If you read the thorough interview from TIME magazine below, it's a breath of fresh air when compared to the vitriol directed at Greek PM candidate Alexis Tsipras in much of the media worldwide. Instead, reading about his proscriptions, you begin to see how the real irrationality comes from the people currently making policy (aided and abetted as they are by the media that always speaks power to truth).
http://www.time.com/...
It's a paradox to think Greece can stay in the euro zone if the austerity policies continue to be implemented. The austerity policy, and especially this extreme policy based on the term "internal devaluation", is exactly what we should have avoided.
It's the wrong prescription, the wrong medicine for the patient, because Greece has a production base with a special characteristic: 90% of the small businesses' production, which are the foundation of the Greek economy, is not exported. It is sold on the domestic market. So, when you make a horizontal cut of the wages and the pensions, inevitably there is an impact on the consumption. Hence, 200,000 small Greek businesses have closed down! As a result, unemployment rates soared — nowadays, one out of two young people under 30 years old is unemployed — and the recession became deeper to the point that it's the fifth consecutive year of recession and GDP lost 20 points, which has never happened before in any European country in a time of peace!
Therefore, we realize that these policies were the wrong medicine for the crisis; they were shocking, ineffective policies, which led Greek people to face the possibility of a humanitarian crisis. When there is a patient, and you give him medicine, and it only makes him worse, it is not logical to insist on giving him a higher dose of the same medicine. You've got to change the medicine. If we continue taking this austerity medicine, and especially at a higher dose, that's when Greece is going to be forced out of the euro.
He is operating on a very rational basis: Greece is broke, and heaping loans after loans on it which are redirected to banks, while shrinking its economy and deliberately increasing its debt, and reducing its possibility to ever pay it back, is bad policy.
His proscriptions read like the voice of sanity. If the Europeans want to use the Greek bailout to pay back their banks, they better think of a new way to do it. Like, pay their banks directly and keep Greece out of it. For the Greeks, they shouldn't expect money from the Europeans but rather they should be ready to go it alone and get by on their own revenues. If they can't do this (pay for their gov't) and pay their debt to banks at the same time, that's the banks' problem (i.e. prioritize the nation's needs first). If the EU wants to help out by providing them some money so that Greece doesn't renege on an amount of debt it can pay sustainably, then the EU should consider that a win-win. If the EU wants to make an example of Greece by punishing it and expelling it from the eurozone, then there's nothing the Greeks can do about it since the current policies are leading that way regardless.
If you read between the lines of this thorough interview, the young man is rational, more rational than the crazy policies enacted by prior Greek leaders and the Eurogroup. I bet that secretly, within the IMF, there have been all sorts of studies which say the same exact things that he does.