For the better part of six months now, mainstream politicians in Greece and their financial backers in northern Europe have threatened the country’s austerity-whipped citizens with a do-or-die proposition: suffer the short-term pain of government cutbacks or accept the longer-term distress, not to mention ignominy, of life outside the euro.

But now, as Greece faces yet another year of its economy shrinking by 6 percent and with the unemployment rate last week hitting 22 percent, a growing number of Greeks have rejected this as a false choice.

Instead, they argue that they can have it both ways by staying in the euro and rejecting the harsh budget-balancing measures Europe has demanded in return for the money Greece needs to remain solvent.

That, at least, was the message of the markets-rattling election result on May 6 in which the two dominant parties that had signed off on the terms of Greece’s 130 billion euro bailout deal took a drubbing.