Two and half years after Greeks voted into power a coalition government led by Antonis Samaras, the head of the center-right New Democracy party, they returned to the polls this weekend.
The elections, which were forced because the Greek parliament was unable to select a new president, have propelled Greece back into the world’s headlines. The Coalition of Radical Left, known by its Greek acronym Syriza, won a decisive victory. According to official projections, it polled at 36.5 percent of the vote compared to 27.7 percent for New Democracy, 6.3 percent for the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and 5.9 percent for To Potami, a centrist party. It is still unclear whether Syriza will be able to win the minimum of 151 seats (out of 300) that it will need to govern alone, or if it will have to find one or more coalition partners to form a government. Either way, Syriza’s 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras, who ran a successful anti-austerity campaign, will be the next prime minister of Greece.
Until 2010, Syriza was a small fringe party on the far left. Its transformation to electoral powerhouse is commonly explained as a reaction to the devastating effects of the economic depression that has racked Greece for about eight years now. Since 2007, Greece has lost one fourth of its GDP, and its unemployment rate has surpassed 25 percent. It is, in other words, natural for Greek voters to turn toward a party that is promising them a different economic recipe.
In particular, Syriza has promised to do away with austerity, which was imposed on Greece in 2010 by the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the IMF (collectively known as the Troika), after...