With 36.3 per cent of votes in favour, the pro-Marxist Syriza won nearly half of the seats of the Parliament. The 40-year leader and the new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in a dignified but restrained statement, stated,” Today the Greek people have written history. The Greek people have given a clear, indisputable mandate for Greece to leave behind austerity”. The official communist party of Greece, KKE, had to pay the price of slandering against Syriza, having received only 5.5 per cent of votes while the neo-fascist Golden Dawn got 6 per cent. The right-of-centre New Democracy, received 27.8 p.c. of votes.

Little wonder, the Greek stocks dropped by over 3.5 per cent, immediately after the results were out, but euro traded marginally higher than dollar in the early European trading. After all, the poll outcome marked ‘an astonishing upset of Europe’s political order’. The European Left barring the official communist parties that are bogged down to Stalinist hangover is excited. Only PCF, Communist Party of France, has been consistently supporting Syriza since 2012. .Ahead of the election, there was a new wave of capital flight, estimated at euro 8 billion sensing Syriza’s victory.

Syriza is characterized as an anarchist combination that emphasizes a non-electoralist perspective too in the sense that the leadership thrives on struggles outside the parliament. . Its resort to ‘electoralism’ is a compulsion in a grave financial crisis. An anarchist explanation is that “it will take a period of weeks for Syriza to have been in power long enough to demonstrate that the problem with the old electoral left was not reducible to corrupt social democrats and lying politicians. Rather it is in the nature of the electoral system, a system that takes in young idealist transformers and spits out older, corrupt defenders of the status quo.” These anarchists are different from the Bakuninist or Proudhonist thinking as they look forward to a grand mean between democracy and socialism, and closer to Marxian thinking.

Financial Times blogger Gideon Rachman, an apologist of neo-liberal finance capital, described Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras ‘as a cross between Salvador Allende and Rosa Luxemburg.” Expecting an inevitable collapse of Syriza, he thinks “the left will be ready with a new ‘stab-in-the-back; theory” But he snaps fingers at the Germans, or the bankers and even the CIA for the setback of the right in Greece. He is in a tearing hurry to say within two days after Tsipras assumed the power that the new government came up ‘with a left-wing version of voodoo economics: the belief that a spending splurge will pay for itself, if it is just pushed with enough energy and determination’

Forbes commentator on banking and finance Frances Coppola described the Syriza win as restoration of dignity for Greece.” The debt crisis in Greece has resulted in a similar Depression to that suffered by Germany in the 1930s. In more than five years of deep recession, Greek GDP has fallen by over a quarter. Adult unemployment is at over 25 p.c. and youth unemployment double of that. And despite the austerity measures designed to reduce Greece’s debt burden, debt has risen as a percentage of GDP from 108% in 2008 to over 170% today. Greek government spending has fallen considerably during this time and Greece is now running a very small primary surplus”

According to a Canada based economic thinker, “‘it will not be for Syriza a smooth sailing. The Syriza government would have been in a much stronger position internally and externally if the communists were in it. The rightist party which shares power with it will not make things easy..Quite the contrary. .The danger is how much Syriza could compromise in its negotiations with the trio who are a much stronger opponent. If ultimately the party has to give up much of what it has promised to its own people that will be a disaster. The rightists strength is not at all negligible. And the international (particularly European) Left is not strong enough to defend it.” European leaders, especially, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are implicitly at work to strangulate the north European country that creates a new hope for the libertarian Left. Syriza victory is a source of inspiration for Spain right now. A year ago Podemos (“We can”) began riding high in opinion polls. It has too a charismatic leader, Pablo Iglesias. The Left alliance in Spain calls for an end to traditional politics and rolling back austerity.

For the charismatic 40 year old Greek Prime Minister, there is no time to be lost and he has already activated himself by stopping the privatization programmes of the preceding regime and declaring that Europe must not treat Greece as a weak junior partner. His government on Tuesday denounced a European Council statement in which European leaders blamed Russia for the escalating violence in Ukraine and raised the prospect of new economic sanctions.

In its statement, Greek PM’s office said that the European Council statement had been issued without the consent of Greece and this cannot be the unanimous European Council statement as has always been the practice. Thus the Syriza’s victory is just not the beginning of a new battle in Europe over the future of the austerity programme and the debt relief package, it also signals a new equation within the European Union members where the decisions are taken by consensus.

Mr. Tsipras has been a sharp critic of European sanctions against Moscow he even met the Russian ambassador in Athens, the day he was sworn in. Thus a completely new situation has arisen in European Union with a strongly dissenting Greek view on Russian sanctions which could greatly complicate the foreign policy of Europe which is being led mainly by Germany. Countries like Hungary and Slovakia also dislike sanctions but they lack the guts to oppose officially. Now with Greek’s open position, they might come out with their views in EU meetings.

Thus the new political combination in Greece has the opportunity to bargain with the European creditors over the bailout package provisions with strength. Major European powers like Germany by now know that the new Greek regime could complicate the European goals in Ukraine if they continue with their present hard position during talks on austerity package... Much will depend on Tsipras’s negotiating skills in turning the tide in his favour. (IPA Service)