Since I’m about to moralise about the Greek crisis, I must begin by saying how I’d have voted in Sunday’s referendum. I’d have voted No, emphatically, even knowing what I do know about successive Greek governments’ corrupt mismanagement and feeling how I feel about the irritating Yanis Varoufakis and the provincial Alexis Tsipras.

Furthermore, I would have seen myself as voting according to the voice of reason and against populist posturing.

It’s important to get that straight, one point at a time. If European political leaders, including Malta’s own, labour under the impression that the Greek result is the fruit of a duped electorate or a nation of bums that wants affluence without work, then it’s going to be that much harder for Europe to pick its way out of the mess.

To start with, were the Greek voters duped?

The charge has been levelled by the influential German MEP, Elmar Brok, who has written that the result will be respected but that Tsipras and Varoufakis had misrepresented the disagreements with the creditors.

Another version of the charge is that Tsipras must have a secret agenda to get Greece out of the eurozone (something that most Greeks do not want). Otherwise, the negotiating strategy of Varoufakis – whose obnoxiousness alienated all his counterparts – would have not made sense.

Finally, many ordinary news readers reached the conclusion that the Greek people who were celebrating the No vote in the streets cannot quite have been in their senses since the future after the referendum remained as treacherous as ever.

Let’s deal with the last first.

Had I voted No, I wouldn’t have celebrated out in the streets. But I understand people who did. The celebrations were a release of long pent-up emotions. For the last several months, the creditors had been aiming to delegitimise the Greek government. The referendum result, while leaving the economic quandary exactly as it was, was a collective endorsement of Tsipras’s rejection of more of the same. He returns to the negotiations, in fact, with the support of all Greek mainstream political parties.

Note that he returns. Had his secret agenda really been a Grexit, he’d have retained Varoufakis as finance minister, citing Greece’s sovereign right to choose its negotiators, and, thus, made a fresh start practically impossible. But Tsipras has been emollient since the result was announced. He does want a deal, even if whether he can avert a Grexit is something else.

How, therefore, to make sense of Greece’s negotiating strategy?

The Greek people have already paid harshly for the sins of their leaders

This question always leads to the obligatory mention of how Varoufakis is an expert in game theory, after which his behaviour is read in that light.

Actually, however, game theory is a mathematicised speciality of economics whose finer points have little relevance to the negotiations.

It’s not that game theory does not yield insights but, once mathematically proven, they’re easy for laymen to learn.

Being a specialist gives you no advantage (just as being an automobile engineer doesn’t give you an edge over other car drivers). Negotiating experience counts for more.

Making sense of Greece’s strategy, in fact, turns on realising it was deeply flawed. There wasn’t a single consistent strategy but a flip-flop between goals and red lines. Mario Draghi, the governor of the European Central Bank, has a better record of outfoxing Germany.

Which leads to the second key question: Is Greece therefore negotiating to rewrite the fable of the grasshopper and the ant and have the work-shy grasshopper live off the labours of the hardworking ant? If only it were that simple.

There’s no doubt that successive Greek governments avoided necessary economic reforms of a country whose labour costs were higher than Germany’s. Even after the economic crisis broke out, one of the first acts of the Greek Parliament was to take measures to ensure more jobs for the party faithful while the then new government signed spendthrift public contracts. There are good reasons for European governments not to take what their Greek counterparts say at face value.

But it’s also true that some of what happened was with the collusion of the rest of Europe. No enforcer was looking too closely at eurozone rules in the first few years because France and Germany were also breaking them. Germany’s economic growth in the noughties was partly fuelled by exports to spendthrift Greece.

The Greek people have already paid harshly for the sins of their leaders. The creditors imposed a payback regime that made an economic crash far worse. What’s more, what the creditors have so far demanded will make it impossible for Greece to pay back its debt.

The creditors’ proposed remedy has been disastrous for Greece. We know that on the authority of mainstream economics. Nobel prize winners like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and authorities like Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Piketty are all agreed that the creditors were demanding an austerity that violated economic logic.

For all their own populism, inexperience and abrasiveness, Varoufakis and Tsipras have actually been making the case based on enlightenment reason: that policy should be based on tried and tested cases. Austerity economics does not have a single success story.

It may have needed the abrasiveness of outsiders like Tsipras and Varoufakis to make the point at summit meetings. The fact that debt-payment conditions could be different from those being imposed on Greece – that, in fact, Germany finished paying off its war debts in 2010 – has long been mentioned in economic and financial circles.

Yet, somehow, it seemed unmentionable in political circles until the brash Greek upstarts came along. Now, it’s out in the open.

Ignoring the voice of economic experience and knowledge has been as populist as anything that Tsipras has said and done. To have done so in the name of teaching lessons about paying the price of one’s actions: that has been even worse. The private banks that lent recklessly have not been given any lesson at all.

None of this takes away from the real economic reforms that Greece must undertake. But the first step must be to get rational about the problem. And that means holding Greece to terms that don’t violate the tenets of macroeconomics.

ranierfsadni@europe.com