Now the real challenge begins for Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s charismatic young prime minister Alexis Tsipras’s victory in Greece’s fifth election in six years has positive implications not only for Greece’s democracy, but for Europe at large. His Syriza party’s comfortable seven-point lead over the right’s New Democracy party came as a surprise after polls had placed the parties neck and neck. Few had bet that a party that came to power only eight months ago on a loud promise to end austerity would be comfortably re-elected once voters knew that more, not less austerity, was on the way. No less mind-boggling is that this result came just two months after a referendum in which 61% of Greeks rejected the EU’s bailout deal. But a clue to Mr Tsipras’s success is surely to be found in the way he managed to convince Greeks that their national self-respect had been restored. Some may also be hoping that the bitter economic medicine that looms will be diluted, a hope that EU creditors are likely to discourage. Whatever acceptance of austerity may have filtered down, Greeks have apparently decided that, if cuts in public spending are inevitable, they would rather see them implemented by someone who fought them hard, rather than by those traditional parties whose past resistance lacked Mr Tsipras’s bravado. Continue reading...
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