According to the French newspaper Le Monde, former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras is preparing a political comeback with the publication of his new book, Ithaca. The 730-page work, released on Monday 24 November by the Athens publisher Gutenberg, revisits the traumatic episode of Greece’s 2015 crisis and has already stirred the political scene (Le Monde).
Le Monde describes Tsipras as a “left-wing troublemaker” who, at age 40, became Greece’s youngest prime minister and clashed with Brussels in 2015 in an effort to end austerity measures. Greek media and analysts are treating the book as a possible prelude to his return to active politics (Le Monde).
In excerpts from the audiobook released several days before publication, Tsipras declares, “It is time to tell my truth.” He frames the book as bearing witness to the experience of a country and its people who, during one of the darkest moments in their modern history, dared to claim their dignity.
The book recounts Tsipras’s negotiations with Greece’s creditors, the pressure from Europe, and the difficult decision to hold a July 2015 referendum rejecting a proposed austerity program that was widely seen as excessively harsh for the Greek people. Tsipras writes that “we no longer had any means of pressure; the only thing left was (…) our image — the image of a country that, instead of signing its humiliation, asks its people to decide.”
Ithaca is already the subject of legal dispute after unauthorized excerpts were leaked, a development that has further unsettled the Greek political landscape as observers closely watch Tsipras’s next moves (Le Monde).
