# Alexis Tsipras **Born 28 July 1974.** Prime minister of Greece 2015–2019, and the politician who called the referendum of 5 July 2015 and then did the opposite of what it said. He is in this vault for a reason that has nothing to do with the left–right axis: **his career is the cleanest available demonstration that the constraint on a government is not always its opponents.** ## 2015 Syriza went from 4.6% in 2009 to government in January 2015 on a promise to end austerity. Six months later, negotiations having failed and the banks having closed, Tsipras put the creditors' terms to a referendum and campaigned for rejection. **61.3% voted No, on 62.5% turnout, with a No majority in every one of the 56 electoral districts.** His finance minister resigned the next morning. Eight days later Tsipras signed a third programme with conditions **harsher** than the ones rejected — because the alternative on the table was exit from the euro, which he judged, and most Greeks in polling agreed, to be worse. He then implemented it, won re-election in September 2015 anyway, and governed to 2019. > [!note] Why this is not simply a betrayal story > Both of the obvious readings are too easy. **"He sold out"** ignores that no route existed from a No vote to better terms — the leverage he was testing turned out not to exist. **"He was responsible"** ignores that he chose to hold the referendum, and that asking a question you cannot act on is itself a serious act. **The interesting version is the third: he discovered in public, on a deadline, that the decision was not his**, and the discovery is what the electorate has never forgiven or forgotten. See [[Greek Debt Crisis]]. ## Aftermath and Return Syriza lost in 2019, lost badly in 2023, and fractured. Tsipras resigned the leadership in 2023 and left parliament. Under a succession of leaders the party fell toward irrelevance and now polls around **1%** — heading out of parliament entirely. In 2026 he returned with a new vehicle: **ELAS, the Greek Left Alliance**, launched in the first half of the year, its acronym a deliberate echo of the Communist-led wartime resistance army of the [[Greek Civil War]]. It polls **17.1%** in the 25 August 2026 average — **second, ahead of PASOK**, while the party he built and led to power sits at one. **A leader outlasting his own party by a factor of seventeen is a fact about Greek politics after 2015 rather than about him:** the crisis destroyed institutional loyalty and left personal vehicles as the only durable political form. The same pattern is visible on the right in **Elpida**, built around Maria Karystianou's campaign over the Tempi rail disaster, at 7.9%. ## See Also - [[Greek Debt Crisis]] · [[Metapolitefsi]] · [[Greek Civil War]] · [[Greek History Hub]] - [[Austerity]] · [[European Union]] · [[International Monetary Fund]] · [[Populism]]