The measures passed, narrowly, setting up Greece’s moment of truth. Would it all be enough to convince the troika that Greece had changed its ways?

“I’ve called it the ‘thriller,’” said Raphael Moissis, the deputy chairman of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, the think tank from which Stournaras was plucked to lead the Ministry of Finance. “We literally stayed up the night to hear whether the Europeans were going to say yes to a restructuring program for Greece, or whether they were going to say ‘the hell with you.’”

On November 27th, the troika announced that it would release the next round of loans. Greece would remain in the Eurozone. The decision was a victory for Stournaras, one step forward in what he described as a “multifaceted war.”

* * *

But was the triumph really so clear-cut?

One morning in 2009, Chris Spirou was laid off by an Athens bakery. A divorced father, he spent three months looking diligently for a job but found nothing, eventually making his way to Norway and the Netherlands to find work before returning home when his father died. After getting the boot from a friend’s trailer, he suddenly became homeless—an “indescribable” realization, he said.

“I am below zero. Wrecked. Devastated,” said Spirou, who is fifty-four. He said he feels “hate” for the people who put him in this position: members of Parliament and technocrats like Stournaras. “He doesn’t look at the political cost even if human beings are committing suicide, losing their jobs, their children are hungry.” Austerity, Spirou said, has killed the economy.

Some prominent economists echo Spirou’s analysis. Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, said that although large-scale cutbacks may in fact be reducing Greece’s budget deficit, these gains have come with “catastrophic consequences”: homelessness, suicides, unemployment, once-comfortable families reduced to rummaging through trash bins.

Other economists, meanwhile, are asking a larger question: Does austerity even work? Paul Krugman has argued that Europe’s reliance on austerity—not just in Greece—is precisely the opposite of what should be done: according to the logic popularized by John Maynard Keynes, economies falter when people stop spending, and when that happens, only governments can step in as spenders to get things going again.

Of course, given Greece’s economic woes, the country could not have implemented this theory on its own. Other Europeans, with Germany in the lead, were willing to kick in enough for Athens to close its deficits over a period of years, but they would not offer up sufficient sums for the Greeks to spend their way out of the desert. To the contrary, they insisted on cuts.

Describing the decisions he made, Stournaras, whose compact, athletic build and frequent smile made him look younger than his years, was resolute. Along with Prime Minister Samaras, he said, he fought to mitigate the pain—by cutting property taxes, for example. But even now, Stournaras—who calls himself a “reconstructed Keynesian”—believes that cuts, though upsetting, are working; unfortunately, there aren’t many other ways to reduce the public-sector deficit, and to forgo the cuts would only damage the economy further.

“But this is not something easy that you can tell the public,” he said. “That the alternative is Argentina or even Syria.”

It was muggy during my visit, and while Stournaras spoke, he wore shirtsleeves and a tightly cinched purple tie, having removed a dark suit jacket. He ticked off the government’s accomplishments: an operating budget surplus for the first seven months of this year, increased competitiveness in once-closed markets, and a slowing of the economy’s contraction. Most of which means little to the twenty-eight per cent of Greeks who are out of work, or to those who have suffered debilitating cuts to their pay and pensions.

“It’s not easy for somebody who was earning two thousand euros suddenly to earn one thousand,” Stournaras said. The cuts he has championed have affected even his own mother. “A poor woman, because my father had died very young,” he said. “So she lives on the minimum pension.”

How does that make you feel? I asked.

“Very bad,” said the father of two, his eyes now fixed on his desk. “Very bad, really.”

* * *

Stournaras was born in Athens, in 1956. His father was a Communist, he told me, whom “ultra-rightist” gangs persecuted and tried to have arrested; years later, when Stournaras was doing graduate work at Oxford, his father, who died at the age of sixty-two, asked him not to return home because he feared his own politics would haunt his son. Early on, Stournaras took up swimming and still regularly swims long distances. (He also jogs and plays ping-pong.) In his car on the way to a meeting with the Prime Minister, he told me that swimming was the best preparation he received for the rigors of his position. These days, he avoids swimming in pools, which could seem luxurious while other Greeks are forced into homeless shelters. “So I have to train myself and go to the sea,” he said. During a recent six-kilometre swim, the waters near his vacation home on the island of Syros turned rough. When I met him, he was unable to hear from his right ear.

In many ways, Stournaras is the ideal messenger for Greece’s tough news: he is respected in European economic circles, seen as someone who operates above partisan politics. Before taking office, he was a professor at the University of Athens, chairman and C.E.O. of Emporiki Bank, and advised prior governments. Stournaras was appointed to the Ministry of Finance, not elected. This gives him the freedom to make controversial decisions, but on the flip side, of course, if his policies become too unpopular, Prime Minister Samaras can summarily fire him. The afternoon before I met Stournaras, Michael Massourakis, the chief economist at Alpha Bank, told me that in choosing Stournaras, “the political parties wanted to find somebody who is nonpolitical so they can scapegoat him if things go bad.”

For the moment that seems unlikely. Although Samaras came to office on a pledge to slow austerity measures and Stournaras has supported them, the two are now friends who work together closely, meeting often, sharing jokes.

In the midst of our discussion, Stournaras’s phone rang. It was the Prime Minister.

“I have a reporter here from the The New Yorker,” Stournaras told him. “Shall I put you on?”

Stournaras activated the speakerphone setting so I could hear. Samaras—laughing knowingly—informed me that despite “previous ideological differences” he and Stournaras share a common goal: keeping Greece in the eurozone.

“That’s what I told him!” Stournaras said.

“Do you hear me, Yannis?”

“Yeah, yeah, I do.”

“Am I correct in this assessment?”

“Absolutely.”

Then Samaras quoted Neil Diamond. “You know that song that says, ‘Used-to-bes don’t count anymore, they just lay on the floor till we sweep them away?’” he said. “The idea is that differences don’t matter as long as there is a common cause that links us together.”

As Samaras spoke, Stournaras smiled appreciatively. Despite this display of seemingly genuine affection, it was hard for me to forget what I’d been told a day earlier: that for all this friendship, Stournaras could yet prove dispensable.