The old narrative was that the Greeks were lazy and didn't want to pay their taxes.
The new narrative is that the hapless and naive Greeks were incapable of understanding that the clever Germans were tricking them. Personally it seems extremely paternalistic and condescending.
I think that if you want to treat the Greeks like adults, you have to lay some of the blame at the feet of their government. They borrowed too heavily with access to cheap capital and put too much of the money toward social services and not enough toward economic modernization.
Actually, Greeks blamed the politicians long before the narratives. It was a known issue all along, the cheating politicians, the scandals and what not, but nobody knew it was THAT bad, because the government lied.
If anything is the Greek people's fault is that they stayed with this con for way too long, in the name of stability. The overblown public sector was always the butt of the joke, but everyone else had the opportunity to do relatively well, so one was really willing to change things up.
And that sums the the modern Greek populace. Longing for change but unwilling to move on until it is too late and out of its hands. In my opinion, this goes back to the civil war and junta etc, when a lot of national ghosts were created, and generations were scarred, wanting an opportunity to move on and thus latching onto the overpromising politicians like Papandreou or Karmanlis. If they can secure yourself and your family a job then it's ok. You can't expect the average citizen to think long term.
In the end, it became a farce of two political parties promising their voters things and switching places every other election; there is an interesting book on this, 'Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece',by Takis S. Pappas. And considering Greece has a lot of old people, that system was thriving until the crisis.
Tl;dr: My point is, the Greek people blame themselves, their past choices, the politicians, the system. They are completely self-aware and put the blame on themselves before anyone else.
