Tsipras campaign meets cold shoulder

The Greek showdown in Brussels on Thursday has been cast as a straightforward battle of guile between Alexis Tsipras, the new chieftain of Athens, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s long-time chancellor.

But there is more to it than that. The situation looks increasingly like a struggle between Tsipras and most other European leaders.

Tsipras is a mere fortnight into the job so the point can be made that the Greek premier is unlikely to declare his hand before he actually enters the summit chamber for the first time.

Yet he has done quite a good job already of making his own task more difficult.

While there is no challenge to Tsipras’s democratic mandate, the sense remains that his arch rhetoric and that of his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has only hardened attitudes against major concessions.

Varoufakis’s comments on the debt of Italy went down very badly indeed in Rome and served only to intensify resistance in Portugal, Spain and elsewhere.

Germany is unflinching, the stance of the Finns and Dutch is the same and the sense remains that Tsipras received little enough in the way of substantial support from French president François Hollande. The leaders of the Baltic states, themselves no strangers to grinding retrenchment, are no more enthusiastic.

And, in spite of mixed messages from Dublin, Taoiseach Enda Kenny is hardly an outlier in respect of his basic demand for Greece to stick with its agreements.

There is scope for compromise, certainly, but it is still strictly within the realm of interest rate and loan maturities.

And there is no question but that EU leaders will seek binding pledges from Tsipras in respect of economic reforms. The question remains as to whether he can deliver on that even if he is minded to agree, and whether his own party and its ring-wing coalition partner would concur.

The unveiling in London last week of Greek proposals for growth-linked bonds received a chilly response around the euro zone. The push to link debt repayments with economic growth has already raised old questions over the reliability of Greek statistics, a problem which was at the very origin of the debacle more than five years ago.