Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, likes to shake things up and, in recent days, he has reverted to form. After 16 months of faithfully toeing the line, the leader rebelled, cautiously at first and then almost jubilantly, casting off the fiscal straightjacket that has encased his government with thinly veiled glee.

First came the announcement that low-income pensioners, forced to survive in tax-heavy post-crisis Greece on €800 or less a month, would receive a one-off, pre-Christmas bonus. Then came the news that Greeks living on Aegean isles which have borne the brunt of refugee flows would not be subject to a sales tax enforced at the behest of creditors keeping the debt-stricken country afloat.

Finally, another announcement both antagonising and pointed: 30,000 children living in poverty-stricken areas of northern Greece will henceforth be entitled to free meals in schools.

The reaction wasn’t instant but, when it came, it was delivered with force. The European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s financing arm, announced that short-term relief measures, agreed only a week before to ease Greece’s debt pile, would be frozen with immediate effect.

It did not take long before the German finance ministry, under the unwavering stewardship of Wolfgang Schäuble, followed suit, requesting that creditor institutions assess whether Tsipras had acted in flagrant violation of Athens’ bailout commitments with his unilateral moves.

The leftist insisted that the aid – €61m in supplementary support for pensions and €11.5m for the school meals – would be taken from the primary surplus his government, unexpectedly, had managed to achieve. The assistance would help “heal the wounds of crisis”.

“We want to ... alleviate all those who have over these difficult years made huge sacrifices in the name of Europe,” he announced before holding talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel late Friday.

Those who live in Athens know that while the Greek crisis may ebb and flow, it never goes away.

Everyone involved – Europe’s paymaster, Germany, the 19-member euro group of eurozone finance ministers, the ESM and the International Monetary Fund – are acutely aware that almost any move could reignite the problems. “Let us not play shadowy games with Greece’s future,” wrote EU economic affairs commissioner Pierre Moscovici in the pages of the Financial Times, urging that decisions be made “in the common interest”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tsipras held talks with Angela Merkel on Friday 16 December. Photograph: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

But, inexorably, the next act has already begun. Seven years after the scale of its deficit was revealed, prompting the first of three bailouts to avert bankruptcy, Greece is nowhere near economic recovery. Despite rosy prognostications by the country’s central bank – on Friday, it predicted that the economy, which grew by a mere 0.1% in 2016, would expand by 2.5% next year and 3% in 2018 – the nation has lost a third of its economic output.

The byproducts of the crisis, starting with an unemployment rate of 27% – and 52% among the young – are the backdrop against which the drama is played.

Tsipras has seen his support haemorrhage as fury has grown over his embrace of the very austerity measures his Syriza party once pledged to overthrow. If elections were held tomorrow, he would lose outright to the conservative New Democracy party shown to be leading by as many as 15 percentage points in a recent poll.

But that also makes the leftist leader unpredictable. Demands for further tax increases, wage and pension cuts – reforms Athens says it is under immense pressure to apply by the International Monetary Fund if it is to come anywhere close to achieving a projected primary budget surplus of 3.5% by 2018 – have created a tinderbox situation. And that, say analysts, is one that at 42, with much of his political career still before him, Tsipras may well elect to exploit. “All scenarios are open, including fresh elections,” says professor Dimitris Keridis, who teaches political scientist at Athens’ Pandeion University.

“He’s playing the resistance fighter on the one hand and the leader who wants resolution and Greece to remain in the euro on the other,” he told the Observer. “But the reality is very hard and he is also hostage to his rhetoric. That means he could go either way.”

Which way depends to great degree on how the lender institutions also react. A report looking into the impact of the social benefits – passed into law on Thursday – will be evaluated next week.

The appetite for more Greek drama when Europe is dealing with crises on so many other fronts is limited. But there are rules – and uncompromising positions – that have a force of their own and may well propel the drama forward. This time around, away from Greece, the main actors are in open conflict.

Speculation is rife that the IMF may not decide until the spring whether it should support the latest bailout, with officials in Washington not only making the case for more debt relief, but citing deep-seated disagreement over Germany’s demand that Athens achieve such a high primary surplus in the years ahead. Without the IMF on board, it is doubtful whether Berlin can muster the legislative backing to keep disbursing funds from the €86bn programme agreed last summer.