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NEW DELHI: Alexis Tsipras has been sworn-in as Greece’s new Prime Minister. At 40, he is the country’s youngest Prime Minister since 1865. Tsipras “Coalition of the Radical Left” -- known colloquially by its acronymn SYRIZA -- won the January 25 polls and went on to become the winning coalition getting 36.3 percent of the popular vote and 149 out of 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament.
This has been a meteoric rise for Syriza, with the party polling at 5 percent in 2010. This rise has largely been because of the anti-austerity position of the party, which wants to renegotiate Greece's €240bn (£179bn; $270bn) bailout by international lenders.
Soon after the results, Germany and Netherlands led warnings to the new anti-austerity Greek government about rolling back budget cuts meant to get spending under control. “Germany bears no responsibility for what happened in Greece,” Volker Kauder, the parliamentary caucus leader of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday. “The new prime minister must recognize that.”
“The message ‘we want your support but not your conditions’ won’t fly,” said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. “My message will be that we’re open to cooperation but that the support from Europe also means the Greeks have to make an effort.”
Meanwhile, the head of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, cautioned that a reduction in the country’s debt was “not on the radar”. The EU issued a statement reiterating that Greece would risk its place in the eurozone if it failed to meet its austerity and debt commitments.
On Tuesday, Tsipras unveiled his new cabinet. The appointments indicate that the new leaders is going to be unwilling to back down from pledges to dismantle punitive belt-tightening measures. Yanis Varoufakis -- a radical economist who has described austerity programmes as “fiscal waterboarding” -- was given the post of Finance Minister. Economist and veteran left-wing politician Giannis Dragasakis was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, and tasked with overseeing negotiations with the “troika” of the European Commission, the IMF and the ECB. The 39 member cabinet is in fact dominated by academics leaning toward the left.
Although it is premature to ascertain what lies ahead, the message delivered is clear. Tired of a financial crises that have shrunk the Greek economy by 25 percent since 2008 and driven the unemployment rate to over 25 percent, the message that austerity measures are bad for long-term growth and recovery has begun to resonate with the Greek people.
In this climate of exasperation, Tsipras offers hope. Whether he can deliver -- given the opposition he will face from the “troika” of the European Commission, the IMF and the ECB -- is an entirely different question.
