Photograph by Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP / Getty

Not long after the election victory, in late January, of the Greek anti-austerity party Syriza, I visited a crowded café in central Athens. The new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was unveiling his party’s program that day, and the café’s owners had wheeled in a television so that patrons could watch. A crowd of ill-shaven, chain-smoking men wedged themselves around the screen. As Tsipras reeled off one reform after another—from rehiring laid-off public-sector workers to raising the minimum wage—they broke into wild applause.

For many, Syriza represented the first real hope in years that Greece could climb out of economic crisis. Most of the patrons, including Panos Alexopolous, a welder by trade, had long been out of work. “You wait and wait for something to change,” he told me, “but those previous governments were all the same.” He was laid off in 2009; a year later, Greece, which had racked up enormous debt, agreed to a bailout from international creditors on the condition that it impose a harsh regimen of spending cuts and other economic reforms. His pension dwindled to about four hundred and fifty dollars a month and, following a cut of forty per cent to the country’s health budget, his medical costs soared. Soon, his family was on bread lines. Sometimes, he would set up on a street corner with a sign asking for spare change, but always in a neighborhood far from home so that no one would see. “Syriza,” he said, “is the first government that will give us our pride back.”

Two months on from the election, the government’s pledge to address what Tsipras has repeatedly called a “humanitarian catastrophe” is colliding with the stipulations of Greece’s creditors, who continue to say that austerity measures are necessary for the country to regain solvency. Last week, the European Commission, one of the “troika” of institutions that oversee the bailout and austerity program, warned against putting forward a Syriza bill intended to provide free electricity and food stamps for cash-strapped households. (Under the terms of the bailout, which was extended by four months in a deal signed in February, Athens must get approval for any anti-austerity measures.)

For Syriza to stick to its campaign promises, it would have to contravene the rules of its bailout, which could catalyze a series of reactions that would ultimately force Greece out of the euro. Despite growing dissent in the party’s hard-left wing and its activist base, most Syriza leaders, as well as most of the public, oppose an exit because of the economic troubles it would provoke, at least in the short term. So the impasse won’t be solved anytime soon. For the time being, though, the wave of ebullience brought about by the election has yet to subside. Athens hums with optimism, and the belief that an escape from the crisis is finally possible. Ask around in the city’s crowded cafés, and you’ll hear what has become something of an unofficial mantra about Syriza: “Even if they do ten per cent of what they say,” Alexopolous told me, “they’ll change Greece forever.”

It’s not clear, however, that ten per cent would be enough to rescue Greece from its woes. Around a quarter of the workforce is officially unemployed—a twofold increase from pre-austerity levels—and for those under twenty-four years old, unemployment rate hovers around half. The average family income has plunged to 2003 levels, and forty percent of Greek children now live below the poverty line.

Syriza’s proposed solution is to dramatically increase social spending, to create “effective demand, to pump the economy” as Nikos Theocharakis, the chair of the economics department at the University of Athens, put it. We met in a cinder-block-walled office in downtown Athens, in a bleak building that is home to the country’s premier economics program. The department has undergone multiple rounds of funding cuts—some professors have gone a year without pay. Like other economists I met, Theocharakis called Syriza’s rescue program “pure Keynesian policies.” That naturally raises the question: where will the money come from?

According to Theocharakis, part of the solution will be to raise revenue by tackling corruption and tax evasion—a step espoused by both Syriza and its creditors. Long before Greece’s economic crisis spawned portmanteaus such as “grexit” and “grecovery,” the country had its own intricate vocabulary of venality. Fakelaki refers to envelopes fattened with cash, which have long been used to insure priority in services such as health care. Rousfeti means something akin to patronage, particularly the political connections used to land contracts and civil-service jobs.

Tax evasion is especially widespread among the country’s upper-middle class and rich—the top-most bracket of households and businesses is responsible for eighty per cent of the total tax debt owed to the government. The higher up the ladder you look, the greater the scale of graft becomes. Antonis Kantas, a former deputy minster of defense, testified in court last year that he had taken so many bribes, mostly from multinational weapons manufacturers, that he couldn’t recall them all. The German corporation Siemens, meanwhile, funnelled millions in payoffs to Greek officials over the years, drawing the money from an annual slush fund worth as much as fifteen million euros. The finance ministry estimates that ultra-wealthy Greeks have tens of billions in undeclared offshore accounts, a fraction of which have come to light through the so-called Lagarde list, a spreadsheet naming potential tax evaders that was passed to the Greek government by former the French finance minister Christine Lagarde. (After then Greek finance minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou got hold of the list, the names of members of his family disappeared from it; he was charged with falsifying documents, but the charges were dropped.)

Years of such corruption and tax evasion, coupled with reckless expenditure—as a share of G.D.P., for instance, Athens spent almost twice the E.U. average on military purchases—pushed the Greek state into massive budget shortfalls, prompting the government to borrow heavily. In late 2009, the government announced that it had racked up enough debt to be running a deficit of almost thirteen per cent of G.D.P., sparking fears of a default. Greece’s creditors were mostly European banks, which had, in part, used public bailout money following the 2008 credit crunch to scoop up Greek bonds. For example, French and German banks were on the books for thirty-one and twenty-three billion euros, respectively. The troika stepped in during the spring of 2010, and again in 2012, to orchestrate bailouts of the Greek government, offering two hundred and forty billion euros in loans in exchange for a drastic reduction in government spending and other measures to make the Greek economy more competitive. “Understand that this debt is symbolic,” Theocharakis said. “It’s simply too much to ever be paid back fully.”

Across the hall from his office, there is a poster announcing a lecture on the bailout that bears a depiction of the famous con artist Charles Ponzi. The implication is not subtle: the troika and other creditors raised most of the bailout tranche from capital markets through low-interest bond issues, and then loaned the money to Greece at much higher rates. Close to ninety per cent of the money returns directly to the original creditors, or goes to recapitalize Greek banks; most of the funds don’t even touch the Greek government’s hands, landing instead for a few days in an escrow account, until they are transferred to bond holders.