A few days before Greece’s parliament ratified the country’s first bailout programme in May 2010, Antonis Samaras convened a meeting at his home in Kifissia with his closest associates, including Chrysanthos Lazaridis, Theodoros Vardas, Notis Mitarachi, Christos Staikouras and Yannis Mourmouras.

Of those who took part in the three-hour meeting, none apart from Samaras had any government experience. At the time, only Mourmouras, who would later become Deputy Governor of the Bank of Greece, had argued that the bailout memorandum should be approved, while Staikouras had adopted a middle position. All the others were effectively opposed to the bailout.

Samaras ultimately decided to oppose the agreement – even though its approval was a foregone conclusion, given that the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) held 160 seats at the time and George Papandreou had rejected Evangelos Venizelos’s proposal to seek a three-fifths majority. It was a move that would largely determine Samaras’s subsequent political course, from the Zappeia proposals to his coalition government with PASOK.

The meeting, revealed by academics and political scientists Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou in their book In the Eye of the Storm, is indicative of the dual face Samaras presented in his approach to governing – what the authors describe as the two faces of Janus. While in opposition, he was entirely inward-looking and confined himself to a specific circle of close associates. Once in power, however, he appeared more open to people beyond his inner circle, although he never managed to win the favour of the troika. This contrasted with Alexis Tsipras, who crossed the Rubicon after the July 2015 referendum, earning congratulations from German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Story 1: Coalition government

Samaras became prime minister in June 2012, shortly after the Medium-Term Fiscal Strategy was passed with 199 votes and several MPs were expelled from their parties. Traditional party certainties had collapsed, public discontent had reached unprecedented levels, and government stability depended on cooperation between political forces that, until recently, had regarded one another as their main opponents. It was the beginning of the coalition government between Samaras’s New Democracy and PASOK, led by Evangelos Venizelos. Despite their differences, the two developed a personal channel of communication.

Behind this necessary partnership, however, lay entirely different agendas, which in turn created a constant arena for negotiation alongside the central talks with Greece’s partners.

Featherstone and Papadimitriou use the term ‘Crisis Management Network’ (CMN) to describe the core group of people involved in managing decisions. In Samaras’s case, their research shows, this network operated largely through personal channels, close associates and informal procedures, despite the existence of institutional coordination mechanisms.

This helps explain why, when he settled on Yannis Stournaras for the Finance Ministry, Samaras chose to invite him to his home, citing a problem with his eye, in order to convey the government’s decision that he should take on this crucial role.

The Finance Minister gained direct access to the prime minister and assumed a central role in negotiations with Greece’s creditors. This, however, created a particularly sensitive issue for Venizelos, who had previously served as Finance Minister and had personal experience of the most difficult stages of the crisis. By June 2013, several reports were already describing the relationship between Venizelos and Stournaras as a constant source of tension within the government.

The unusual aspect was that Stournaras, whose political roots lay in the broader PASOK sphere, had become one of the closest associates of the New Democracy prime minister.

Story 2: Humiliation

Greece’s odyssey through the sea of bailout programmes began in October 2009. George Papandreou took office with an impressive 44 per cent of the vote, having made his now infamous declaration that ‘there is money’, but the true scale of the financial crisis gradually became apparent.

International distrust, deteriorating borrowing conditions and the eurozone’s inability to respond swiftly to a debt crisis created an environment in which the usual rules of political crisis management proved inadequate.

At the same time, Papandreou sought to strengthen coordination within the prime minister’s office, with Regina Vartzeli taking on a prominent role in the General Secretariat of the Prime Minister. However, before the first bailout memorandum was put to a vote, when Venizelos proposed setting the threshold for approval at 180 votes, the argument put forward by Yannis Ragousis prevailed. Ragousis said that if the government accepted New Democracy’s support, it would lose the glory of having brought the country out of the crisis on its own.

After the first wasted months, during which the government was handing out… solidarity benefits, time began to run out and Papandreou lacked sufficient economic expertise. He relied exclusively on Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou, a fact that made his private discussions with European politicians range from dramatic to humiliating.

The authors cite two incidents. The German Chancellor reportedly told Papandreou sarcastically, after a meeting, to return to Greece and ‘study his lessons’. Meanwhile, during private discussions with Papaconstantinou, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble raised the possibility of Greece leaving the euro and asked him: ‘Are you really the Finance Minister?’

Story 3: Outsiders

If there was a period when personal relationships within the government assumed an almost leading role, it was undoubtedly the first half of 2015.

As the authors remind readers, Tsipras became prime minister intending to overturn the terms of the previous negotiations. He chose Yanis Varoufakis, an economist with a strong public profile and a different view of how Greece should deal with its European creditors, as Finance Minister.

According to Featherstone and Papadimitriou’s reconstruction of events, Tsipras gave Varoufakis considerable freedom to assemble a circle of advisers with international connections, including James Galbraith, Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers, while also developing his own channels of communication.

The problem emerged when different groups within the government began operating without sufficient coordination. Varoufakis’s relationship with George Chouliarakis, who played a decisive role in the technical negotiations, deteriorated to such an extent that, according to the book, the two men came close to no longer speaking to one another, despite having offices on the same floor.

Varoufakis even attempted to remove Chouliarakis from his role representing Greece in the Eurogroup Working Group. At the same time, Tsipras himself established a separate channel of communication with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, while Varoufakis took part in the Eurogroup negotiations.

Parallel discussions may be commonplace, but in this case the persistent clashes and lack of communication within the government appeared to obstruct the entire negotiating process. Varoufakis’s relationship with Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras was also strained, further complicating an already fraught situation.

Story 4: Paradoxes

One of the book’s most interesting details concerns Tsipras’s personal channels of communication. Despite the deep political divide between them, Tsipras maintained an open line of communication with former prime minister Costas Karamanlis. By contrast, he did not seek advice from Papandreou, even though the latter had been at the centre of the first and particularly critical phase of the financial crisis.

With negotiations in Brussels at a standstill after the end of February 2015, Tsipras and his closest associates began to be convinced that the Finance Minister had become an uncontrollable problem, despite having risen to extraordinary levels of popularity. Varoufakis had secured little more than an extension for the country, while his eccentric appearances at official meetings and statements about recording Eurogroup proceedings had helped turn him into a star.

The prime minister’s European counterparts were equally exasperated. In April 2015, following a confrontational Eurogroup meeting in Riga, Tsipras reorganised his team. He appointed Euclid Tsakalotos, an economist educated at Oxford with strong ties to the party, as head of the Greek negotiating team, while retaining Varoufakis as Finance Minister and Greece’s representative at the Eurogroup.

The arrangement between Tsakalotos and Varoufakis had all the characteristics of a dysfunctional marriage. Varoufakis’s willingness to remain in government despite his obvious demotion was as puzzling and surprising as Tsakalotos’s agreement to take on his new duties without demanding Varoufakis’s complete replacement.

It appears that, at that particular moment, the short-term interests of both men, Varoufakis and Tsakalotos, were aligned with Tsipras’s main strategic objective: to unblock negotiations with creditors without giving the Greek public the impression that he had sacrificed his popular Finance Minister to meet their demands.

After the July 2015 agreement, the balance of power within the government changed dramatically, as did the people involved. This was directly linked to the shift in strategy by the Syriza government and Tsipras, who transformed from a radical opponent of the bailout memorandums into an accommodating implementer of them.

Story 5: The executive state

When Kyriakos Mitsotakis crossed the threshold of the Maximos Mansion in July 2019, Greece had already left its bailout programmes behind, but not the structural weaknesses that the decade-long crisis had exposed in almost painful detail.

As Featherstone and Papadimitriou point out, the new prime minister chose to organise the core of his government differently from the outset, seeking to replace his predecessors’ informal personal arrangements with a more centralised and institutionally established system of coordination.

This approach took concrete shape with Law 4622/2019 on the ‘executive state’, which established the Presidency of the Government and strengthened the prime minister’s office’s ability to monitor ministerial decisions, oversee their implementation and intervene when disagreements arose.

Where Samaras had relied on close associates and personal channels, while Tsipras had allowed parallel centres of negotiation to operate, Mitsotakis sought to establish a more structured hierarchy, with the Maximos Mansion at the centre of government activity.

The authors identify this as a significant shift, while leaving open the question of whether stronger prime-ministerial oversight also ensures more effective coordination, or instead creates new tensions between ministers and the central government team. What is certain is that, after a decade of improvisation, the organisation of power has become a central political issue.

Epilogue: The hidden exercise of power

What connects the very different stories of Papandreou, Samaras, Tsipras and, on different terms, Mitsotakis is not a shared political outlook, but the decisive weight that personal relationships acquire during periods of institutional crisis.

Featherstone and Papadimitriou explore these relationships through the accounts of the key figures themselves, recognising that every personal narrative inevitably reflects its own perspective. Their research is therefore particularly interesting when these accounts are cross-checked against what was publicly documented at the time.

What the book ultimately reveals is not only the importance of how the prime minister’s office is organised, and the strategies and tactics devised during periods of crisis, but also that history has another dimension: one written in a prime minister’s phone calls to his coalition partners, in clashes between ministers around a table, in late-night meetings held before the markets open, and in all those personal relationships that appear to play a decisive role.

In conclusion, as the authors aptly observe, crisis management reveals how power operates in Greece, as well as the almost improvised manner in which Greek prime ministers confronted the most serious economic crisis to hit the country since the Second World War.

Photographs: EUROKINISSI