By negotiating directly with the Eurogroup, rather than the Troika as a whole, they managed to leave the IMF and ECB outside the room where the deal-making happened. As it turns out, the Troika couldn't maintain internal discipline: The party actually present at the table disproportionately gave concessions on areas valued by the parties not at the table.

What surprises me is that the Troika allowed their interlocutors to split their coalition like that.

Yup.

Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Wants Austerity ... for the Rich - Truthdig

Now, why did he think he was negotiating with the troika when in fact he was negotiating with [crosstalk]

HUDSON: Because officially that's who he's negotiating with. He went and he took them at their word. And then he found out--and yesterday, Jamie Galbraith, who went with him to Europe, published in Fortune a description saying, wait a minute, the finance ministers are fighting with the troika. The troika don't have their story straight. The troika and the finance ministers are all fighting among themselves over what exactly is to be done. And to really throw a monkey wrench in, the German finance minister, Schäuble, said, wait a minute, we've got to bring in the Spanish government and the Portuguese government and the Finnish government, and they've got to agree.

Well, all of a sudden the position of Spain, for instance, is, wait a minute, we're in power, we're a Thatcherite neoliberal party. If Greece ends up not going along with austerity and saving its workers, then Podemos Party in Greece, in Spain, is going to win the next election and we'll be out of power. We have to make sure that Varoufakis and the SYRIZA Party is a failure, so that we ourselves can tell the working class, you see what happened to Greece? It got smashed, and we're going to smash you if you try to do what they do; if you try to tax the rich, if you try to take over the banks and prevent the kleptocracy, there's going to be a disaster.

So, obviously, Greece and Portugal want to impose austerity on--Spain and Portugal want to impose austerity on Greece. And even Ireland now has chimed in and said, my God, what have we done? We have imposed austerity for a decade in order to bail out the banks. Even the IMF has criticized us for going along with Europe and bailing out the banks and imposing austerity. If SYRIZA wins in avoiding austerity in Greece, then all of our sacrifice of our population, all of the poverty that we've imposed, all of the Thatcherism that we've imposed has been needless, and we didn't have to do it

....and so the ancient, sinister spell that had kept Europe in thrall for so long was finally broken by truth to power. Little David Tsipras and the slingshot against the mighty Goliath of the marketistas.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty