References, with positive or negative connotations, to the idea of an “honorable compromise” are very much in vogue in Greece. In the media discourse, and, more worryingly, of the government itself, “reaching an honorable compromise” with the so-called “institutions,” as the troika has been renamed, has become the strategic goal of the period.

Needless to say that, on the part of Syriza, this discursive slippage amounts to an abandonment of the objective of the break with the memoranda and the troika rule on the basis of which it won the elections.

But what can, in the present context, this all-pervasive reference to something as opaque as an “honorable compromise” mean?