On a January evening four days before he became the first radical leftist to lead a country in the European Union, Alexis Tsipras bounded to the stage at an outdoor rally in a grubby corner of Athens and proclaimed the imminent end to “our national humiliation.”
Evidence of Greece’s severely degraded state was all around: the graffiti-saturated walls, the abandoned shop fronts, the tattered clothes of the thousands who had turned out that night to cheer a man who vowed to not only remake Greece, but also to transform all of Europe by inspiring leftist movements continent-wide.