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Was Antonis Samaras a cooler Prime Minister than Alexis Tsipras?
Well, let’s see. On the one hand, a sixty-five year old who looks like an undertaker, who brought down a government and formed his own party over being More-Patriotic-Than-Thou, who presided over austerity, and who saw some economic indicators nudge upwards but failed to raise anyone’s hopes that anything would ever change for the better.
On the other hand, a young, vibrant, overgrown student politician, who disputes the status quo, who resents the enmeshment of Church and State, who never wears a tie, who got a whole nation’s hopes up (in a not very hopeful-looking way, granted), and who can mug for the camera:
Oh, Alexis is cooler alright.
Whether “cool” is what Greece actually needs out of its leadership is a quite different question.
[…] In his recent trip to the US, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras gave a talk to the Brookings Institute, during which he mangled a Greek proverb. I’ve linked to Nikos Sarantakos’ blog account of it; as a Greek language blog, Sarantakos is obligated to comment on it, although there has been some controversy over whether his comments were more benign than they should have been. Since εδώ λεξιλογούμε δεν πολιτικολογούμε (“we talk lexicography here not politics”), as Sarantakos’ blog used to say 😉 , I’m going to pass by whether Tsipras’ English has improved or not since he made PM, whether he should have availed himself of an interpreter, and whether he is a cooler PM than his predecessor. […]