ANDREAS PAPANDREOU, a proud Greek socialist who stood up to his country’s coup-mongering generals in the 1960s, won an election in October 1981 by fulminating against the European Economic Community (as it was then known) and vowing to lead Greece out of NATO. But in office he executed a graceful kolotoumba (somersault), discovering a taste for European subsidies that could be used to expand his crony state and turning himself into an engaged, if awkward, NATO partner. Greece’s interests, Papandreou determined, were best served by exploiting the rules of the clubs it belonged to, not by tearing them up.

The ties that bind Europe’s political elites have often turned out to be extraordinarily strong. Sometimes they oblige weak leaders to jettison election pledges. Take François Hollande, who took office in 2012 promising to end European austerity but instead finds himself battling to please Germany by reforming France’s sclerotic economy. When referendums go the “wrong” way, as with Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty in 2009, leaders tweak the text and ask citizens to vote again. The serial bail-outs of the past five years may have empowered populists in creditor and debtor nations, but they have not led to irreparable ruptures. Indeed, these days many politicians in Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus speak warmly, if sotto voce, of the reforms and cuts they had to undertake to stay in the euro zone.

Small wonder Greece’s European creditors thought the radical leftists of Syriza too would fall into line, despite having won power in January on a promise to end austerity. Soon after Greece’s election Charlemagne was told by a senior official in the European Commission, one of the institutions that monitors bail-outs, that Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader and the new prime minister, would turn out to be another Papandreou: a fire-breather on the campaign trail who would soon learn the responsibility that comes with membership of the European family.

It is not the official’s fault that this prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Bar a few lonely Greeks who warned that Syriza was not a party Europe could do business with, almost everyone thought the mysterious forces that keep Europe together would drive Mr Tsipras to accept a cash-for-reforms deal. Early signs of trouble, such as the preening lectures on macroeconomics delivered by Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister, to his euro-zone peers in the Eurogroup, were written off first as amusing, and then irritating. Mr Tsipras, who oozes charm and good cheer, seemed like the sort of man with whom European leaders could strike an agreement. Some thought he might ditch his infuriating finance minister. Almost all believed he would, eventually, perform his own kolotoumba. Yet despite the endless summits, conference calls and late-night negotiations, it never happened.

The moment of truth came on June 26th, when Mr Tsipras called a shock referendum on the creditors’ latest bail-out offer. Officials had thought a deal was close; the negotiations were ongoing when Mr Tsipras made his announcement. The surprise was apparent everywhere: from the face of the commission official with whom Charlemagne was sharing a drink when the news broke, to an emotional speech on June 29th by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the commission, who declared himself “deeply distressed and saddened” by the Greek move.

Now Mr Tsipras has come to the end of the road. This week he continued to seek a deal, even as Greece defaulted on an IMF payment and its bail-out expired. But at the same time he was denouncing his partners on television and urging Greeks to vote “no” to the agreement he sought. No one has been more infuriated than the Germans. On July 1st Angela Merkel, the chancellor, dismissed the latest Greek proposal with uncharacteristic haste. Her government now seems determined to see the back of Mr Tsipras. What many saw as a poker game has turned out to be an unequal bout of Ultimate Smackdown.

This is an extremely unhappy affair for the EU, which thought it had found an unusually effective way of resolving differences between democracies. Now that the rupture with the Greeks is clear, officials in Brussels do not know what to make of it all. “I’ve never in my life seen such people,” says one senior figure involved in the talks. “They are irresponsible! Irresponsible!”

Something had to give

Perhaps the creditors deserve a share of the blame. Their own tactics could have been more sensitive: their response to a Greek proposal last week, which featured paragraphs struck out with red lines and entirely rewritten, infuriated Greeks who are no fans of Syriza. They could have offered some accommodating words on debt relief. Yet that would have been a stretch for many creditor countries. Greece’s government, despite Mr Tsipras’s protestations, is not the only one to enjoy a democratic mandate.

A better argument is that the creditors should have had the foresight to know what the austerity they brought upon Greece might wreak. Few democracies could withstand a 25% contraction in GDP over five years, a calamitous growth in unemployment and the humiliation of having endless budgets written by unelected outsiders. Greece’s pre-2008 boom may have been unsustainable and its politicians venal, but that is of no comfort to retirees whose pensions have been slashed or graduates forced abroad to find work. Syriza appealed to voters who had lost all hope. It offered a false prospectus, perhaps a deceitful one. But it was, in part, the creation of the euro zone’s failed policies.

One still hears European officials lament that Syriza began its reign of calamity just as Greece was starting to recover, as if voters should have merely exercised more patience. Mr Tsipras’s amateurishness has, lamentably, given Europeans an excuse not to examine their own culpability. If Greece does fall out of the euro, its leaders must bear the blame. But Europeans might consider what they can do to ensure a return to the glorious days of fudge.