{"id":4197,"date":"2026-05-06T07:29:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=4197"},"modified":"2026-05-06T07:29:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:29:00","slug":"adventurism-tsipras-fairy-tales-and-the-secret-meeting-with-the-german-ambassador","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/?p=4197","title":{"rendered":"Adventurism &#8211; Tsipras&#8217; fairy tales and the secret meeting with the German ambassador"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reversions are brought to <b>Alexis Tsipras<\/b>&#8216;s journey of political purification to&#8230; Ithaca by the documentary <b>&#8220;In the Millionth&#8221;<\/b> about the bleak days of 2015, when the country faced the monster of bankruptcy, which premiered Monday night on Skai. <\/p>\n<p>It consists of six episodes and is based on the book <b>&#8220;The Last Bluff&#8221;<\/b> by Eleni Varvitsioti and Victoria Dendrinou, who were in Brussels as correspondents in 2015. <b>Tsipras refused to participate<\/b> He did not want to speak because he &#8220;read&#8221; bias and malice. What could he say, after all? His own story is anchored in &#8220;Ithaca&#8221; and any other attempt to recount the facts is Siren. And Tsipras is covering his ears and eyes &#8211; lest he&#8230; go astray. <\/p>\n<p>The first episode of the documentary is set in early 2015, when <b>SYRIZA<\/b> and ANEL took over the country&#8217;s government. <b>Nikos Pappas, Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, Euclid Tsakalotos, Panagiotis Lafazanis and Giorgos Stathakis<\/b> tell how the social current was &#8220;built&#8221; for a&#8230; progressive government. It was when Alexis Tsipras was talking about the <b>repeal of the memoranda &#8220;with a law and an article&#8221;<\/b>. &#8220;Demagogic, populist and cheap slogan&#8221;, argues Panagiotis Lafazanis, while characterizing the Thessaloniki programme as &#8220;airs and graces&#8221;. He was also telling the then prime minister himself, he claims, to get the answer: <b>&#8220;Hey, that&#8217;s what the people want&#8221;. <\/b><\/p>\n<p>As for Alexis Tsipras&#8217; characteristic pre-election phrase that <b>&#8220;the markets will be dancing pentozali&#8221;,<\/b> then Economy Minister George Stathakis treats it&#8230; with tea and sympathy as <b>&#8220;a pleasant pun&#8221;<\/b>. For Euclid Tsakalotos, the decision &#8220;not to have SYRIZA vote for the PM and to bring down the Samaras-Venizelos government&#8221; was a mistake, since it did not, as a result, facilitate subsequent economic policy. <\/p>\n<h3>In the EU&#8217;s clutches<\/h3>\n<p>Europe is taking a wait-and-see attitude about the SYRIZA-Annel government&#8217;s real intentions. &#8220;We were expecting a new approach from a government that was more serious about fighting corruption,&#8221; says <b>Claus Regling,<\/b> managing director of the European Financial Stability Fund from 2012 to 2022. <\/p>\n<p>Giannis Varoufakis<\/a> has been electrifying negotiations with European partners from the start. &#8220;He was less known in the world of econometrics than he led us to believe,&#8221; <b>Thomas Wieser<\/b> says of the former finance minister. &#8220;There was a new finance minister who said we were all crazy and that the approach, in recent years, was wrong,&#8221; says <b>Gerun Dijsselbloem. <\/b><\/p>\n<p>Varoufakis&#8217; first contact with his European counterparts and his joint appearance with Dijsselbloem in Athens have certainly been memorable.<b>After Yanis Varoufakis&#8217;&#8230; dalliance with Yerun Dijsselbloem in front of the cameras, when the then finance minister called the Troika a flimsy committee with which the government does not intend to cooperate<\/b>, Yannis Stournaras &#8211; as he revealed &#8211; contacted the then prime minister. And Alexis Tsipras hung his minister on the pegs. <b>&#8220;He said such a thing. What can we do now?&#8221;,<\/b> he reportedly said. Stournaras hands him the phone number of <b><a href=\"https:\/\/tomanifesto.gr\/mario-ntragki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mario Draghi<\/b>, and Tsipras doesn&#8217;t delay. He calls Draghi and assures him that what the then finance minister said is not true. <\/p>\n<p>Following Yannis Stournaras, <b>Peter Soof,<\/b>the then German ambassador in Athens, comes along to reveal that he saw <b>in secret<\/b> Tsipras in 2014 at Koumoudourou: <b>&#8220;It was just the two of us, he was polite despite his public confrontational rhetoric.<\/b>What I perceived was his intention to signal to Berlin that there was no cause for concern and that Syriza and his government would cooperate.&#8221; It is curious why Tsipras was disturbed by the documentary&#8217;s facts and accounts and even before it was shown, he was talking &#8211; based on rumours and leaks &#8211; about &#8220;distortion of facts&#8221; and &#8220;character assassination&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>Critical point, the claim, according to what Tsipras had learned before the documentary was shown, that his administration had traded no pension cuts for the <b>Prespes Agreement.<\/b>We didn&#8217;t see that. Perhaps it will be&#8230; in the coming days. But the common thread, at least of what was aired, was what <b>Stavros Theodorakis, <\/b>chairman of Potami at the time, who had an active role in critical political developments, pointed out. &#8220;I was hoping that Tsipras was looking for a proposal to avoid making a mess of things with the Europeans.&#8221; And that&#8217;s what Tsipras did, but the annoyance probably has another cause. The documentary demolishes any trace of the sincerity of the&#8230; uncompromising Tsipras. And that&#8217;s why the phone call to Draghi and the meeting with the ambassador didn&#8217;t&#8230; fit into &#8220;Ithaca&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h3>Georgiades on Tsipras: &#8220;The biggest political fraud&#8221;<\/h3>\n<p>Andonis Georgiadis<\/a> is launching a firestorm against Alexis Tsipras, Adonis Georgiadis, in response to what was said in the documentary &#8220;In the Millimeter&#8221;. In a post on X, the health minister called the former prime minister <b>&#8220;a terrible liar&#8221;<\/b>and claimed that he is &#8220;by far the biggest political impostor in the country&#8217;s recent history&#8221;. In 2014, Adonis Georgiades revealed in Greece&#8217;s 2014 report that in the same moment that he was telling the world &#8220;go back madame Merkel&#8221;, &#8220;we will abolish the Memoranda with one law and one article&#8221;, and &#8220;we will beat the drums and the markets will dance&#8221;, at the same moment he asked for and secretly saw the ambassador in his office and told him&#8230; &#8220;He told Berlin that we will cooperate&#8221;, Adonis Georgiades writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The documentary &#8220;In the Millionth&#8221; about the grim days of 2015, when Alexis Tsipras&#8217; journey of political purification towards&#8230; Ithaca brings turbulence to the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}