France’s Liberation is the latest major foreign media outlet to detail the Tsipras government’s often disastrous negotiations with European creditors over the past few months, before finally agreeing to a harsher bailout plan that one presented in February and even rejected by Greek voters in a July referendum.
According to the French daily, European leaders understood they were dealing with an “atypical” government during a particularly sensitive round of negotiation when Tsipras’ closest aide, Nikos Pappas, blurted out “Mr. Prime Minister, you cannot do that, you cannot!”
Liberation continues: “He (Pappas) deliberately speaks in English so that everyone understands. The head of the Greek government has just agreed to align the VAT rate applied on the Greek islands with that of the mainland, as requested by its interlocutors: Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, (Commissioner) Pierre Moscovici … Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the president of the Eurogroup.


“He did not care, obviously,” said one of the witnesses of the scene, which took place in Brussels last spring, during yet another negotiating session.
“The only thing that interested him (Tsipras) was to get negotiations at the political level with the heads of state and government but not to negotiate the details of the financial assistance program. So he accepted VAT on the islands in an irritated gesture,” a source tells Liberation.
“The sudden interruption of Pappas amazes everyone,” the paper notes, with Tsipras and Pappas then exiting the chamber, only to come back and announce that the VAT request could not be granted.
“… in reality, Alexis Tsipras was not prime minister but simply a ‘first among equals’ in a complex political apparatus … As I was a Trotskyite in my youth, I immediately understood how this government is working, what his tactics, strategy are,” Liberation quotes a “laughing” Pierre Moscovici as saying.