He’s a proven liar and hypocrite, and now Greece’s major opposition SYRIZA-Regressive Alliance leader and former premier Alexis ‘Up in Smoke’ Tsipras is a failed soothsayer too.

He apparently thought he was the male Oracle of Delphi when he told Alpha TV that after being routed in July, 2019 snap elections by New Democracy leader and now premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis that the Leftists will win the upcoming spring elections.

And by a first-round knockout.

If he stocked up on Cuban cigars when he went to the funeral of his idol Fidel Castro in Havana in 2016 – Tsipras was the only Western leader – he should have checked to make sure they weren’t any of those doctored by the CIA or sprinkled with hallucinogenics, because he’s fantasizing about that prediction.

He put himself in line to be in this position when his failed government, in the last days of a ruinous 4 1/2-year reign of incompetence, jammed through a law to take away a 50-seat bonus for whomever comes in first in Greek elections.

That made it almost impossible for the winner to have enough seats in the 300-member Parliament to have a single party majority and, barring a coalition, means a second election would be needed.

That would have a 30-seat bonus for the winner under a retaliatory law brought by New Democracy with the elections coming perhaps as soon as April 9 – the week before Easter – sure to be a circus.

He’s already running hard but going nowhere fast in his campaigning despite Mitsotakis shooting himself in the foot – which was in his mouth – over trying to muzzle the media from reporting on a surveillance scandal that saw the National Intelligence Service EYP bug the phones of 15,475 people.

That included Member of the European Parliament Nikos Androulakis, who has resurrected the dormant PASOK-KINAL No Movement for Real Change, who said someone – Mitsotakis said not him – tried to put Predator spyware on his phone.

There are six parties and three independents in the 300-member Parliament, a body far too big for a country of 11 million people, and while they are voted at the ballot box the party leaders pick who’s on their slate to insure loyalty.

The scenario playing out with relatively few weeks left before the election has some combinations that look like a game of political twister and could see odd bedfellows if a coalition is needed to form a government.

Tsipras’ Law – taking away the 50 seat bonus – was his way of conceding the next election before it happened, anticipating another New Democracy win but trying to block the Conservatives from ruling outright again.

His sniping, and Mitsotakis’ backpedaling over the surveillance scandal and supermarket prices that are his real bugaboo, has seen the New Democracy lead cut in half, down to about 6 percent in recent surveys.

The horror of the deadly earthquake in Turkey ended, for now, provocations from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who faces elections on May 14 unless they’re postponed – and who would have been a catalyst in the Greek elections.

Whistling through the graveyard, an unconvincing Tsipras – Alfred E. Neuman’s smirk wasn’t that good – told Alpha TV in an interview that his leftists “will come first” and “will not need a second round,” to return to power.

That’s funny enough to get him on the cover of Mad magazine, SYRIZA’s platform more absurd than a lot of the satirical stories in there, and even he doesn’t believe what he’s drooling.

Tsipras said that he believes “in a government of progressive collaboration that will be a government of winners,” and said that surveys showing he’s behind are wrong. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket, the polls are wrong!

He said the opinion polls “are no longer a safe forecasting tool, especially when opinion polls themselves tell us that a 20 percent of the population decides last minute,” on their choices.

He’s counting on the young to back him, not realizing that among them is a hard-core element of far right-wingers and Fascists who think he’s the enemy, and that under his government scores of thousands of young left Greece in search of work.

He also said he wouldn’t exclude bringing the third-place PASOK-KINAL into a coalition as a junior partner although Androulakis said that won’t happen – and Tsipras ‘What, Me Worry?’ then said he wouldn’t need a partner.

Somebody please smell that tobacco. Before he became Prime Minister in 2015, Tsipras had a framed photograph of Che Guevara – another of his heroes – exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke, so maybe some settled on him then.

His problem is his past, when his government scared off investors, blocked the bonanza of the 8-billion euro ($8.52 billion) development of the abandoned Hellenikon International Airport, and didn’t have a national disaster plan and so bungled the response to the July, 2018 wildfires that 103 people died.

His modus operandi is to run as a revolutionary but he’s a Rebel Without a Clue, a fake leftist who loves the trappings of office capitalism brings, who imposed austerity on the poor and weak and didn’t ‘crush the oligarchs’ who crushed him.

With Tsipras, life is like a box of cigars but you know exactly what you’re going to get. Blue smoke.