Facing abject humiliation at the hands of the German finance ministry, Alexis Tsipras arrived at Sunday’s Eurosummit a broken man.
Having gambled his country’s future in the eurozone on a referendum he might well have expected to lose, the Greek PM found himself in a completely untenable position last Monday. Greeks had overwhelming rejected Europe’s latest proposal, sending the country’s economy into a veritable tailspin and leaving Tsipras to contemplate how he might salvage Greece’s place in the EU without betraying Syriza’s constituency.
It was an impossible task.