“You tell me if there is any other country in Europe where they close the banks for a week and 61% of the people still say no?” This question was posed with immense pride by a schoolteacher as she wandered through the crowds celebrating in central Athens in the early hours of Monday morning. Tired from supporting her husband, laid off from the state broadcaster three years ago and their daughter on a single wage, she was exultant.

Certainly, it is hard to think of any other nation that faced with the collapse of its banks and empty supermarket shelves would place its trust in a 40-year-old with a gift for demagoguery but most of whose promises have proven empty.

Alexis Tsipras came to power in January vowing that he would restore Greece’s dignity and deliver Greeks from the misery of five years of austerity imposed in return for the financial aid the country needed to avoid outright bankruptcy.

After six maddening months, filled with missed deadlines, accusations and rancour, he has failed to do so. His finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who took Greece from a primary surplus and anaemic growth into what most economists expect to be at least a 10-15 point recession, has resigned. Tsipras has persuaded voters that a reinvigorated mandate was what he needed to deliver the elusive deal. It is doubtful that even he believes this.

Syriza’s wrestling match with Greece’s creditors has dominated attention to the extent that there has been little examination of what else it has done in office. Much of its manifesto including promises to bring Greece’s oligarchs to heel, end tax evasion among the elite, and lift the minimum wage are nowhere in sight. There was the high-profile arrest of Leonidas Bobolas in April, a construction and media tycoon who was released after paying $1.9m in back taxes. This smacked of the same tokenism that Syriza lambasted previous governments for when former defence minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos was jailed. There has been no discernible effort to bring Greece’s shipowners to book for their meagre contribution to the state.

What Syriza has done is to bring back some of the worst excesses of its predecessors. The state broadcaster ERT – scrapped abruptly by the previous government under the impulsive and irascible conservative, Antonis Samaras – has been reformed. But instead of fresh blood, the government put ERT’s tainted former leadership back in charge. The return as chief executive of Lambis Tagmatarchis, a television executive associated with the governments who ran up Greece’s debt pile, outraged even the ERT employees who were getting their old jobs back. From prefectures to court appointments, party hacks have been favoured over more qualified counterparts. This is indiscernible from the cronyism of old.

Yanis Varoufakis took Greece from a primary surplus to 10-15 point recession

The gap between Tsipras’ rhetoric on social justice and progressive policy and his record in office has left some to conclude that Syriza is more intent on consolidating its power than delivering the reforms-for-cash deal with creditors that he claims to still want. If not a deal, then what does he want, critics ask?

The openly Marxist wing of Syriza would be more comfortable away from the constraints of the euro, able to renationalise key industries and assume direct control of the economy. Their champions include the belligerent speaker of parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou, who has used her position as a bully pulpit to successfully attack media critics and the independence of the central bank of Greece. Panagiotis Lafazanis, the energy minister, openly eschews the euro and resists creditors’ calls to break up the state power corporation.

The former student leader cannot be seen to take Greece deliberately out of the euro and back to the drachma. Despite Sunday’s resounding no vote there is no substantial support for this. But his supporters, for whom loyalty to Tsipras has been bound memorably by the referendum to defiance and dignity, might accept it, as long as he appears to have made every reasonable effort to reach a deal.

There are important indications that the pursuit of a deal is not simply a feint. The resignation of Varoufakis and the attempt on Monday to reach a common position with Greece’s beleaguered opposition appear to suggest a third bailout is being sincerely sought. But the uglier side of the populism that Tsipras has stirred up to hold his own disparate party together should not be ignored.

The same soft-spoken schoolteacher, who bristled with progressive pride was quick to cite the apocryphal quip from Winston Churchill that Germany should be bombed every 50 years for no reason. Her husband tried to cut in to point out that plenty of Greeks were “small-time crooks” but was silenced with a stare. Greece’s victimhood has been enshrined in the no vote. The foreigners are to blame. And Tsipras’ true intentions are still not clear.