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Business News/ News / World/  After victory, leftist politician forms Greek coalition govt
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After victory, leftist politician forms Greek coalition govt

Alexis Tsipras must determine which promises he can carry out, setting up a likely showdown with European partners

Greece’s newly-appointed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras arrives holding flowers for a ceremony at the Kessariani shooting range site where hundreds of members of the Greek Resistance were executed by Nazi occupation forces during World War II in Athens. ReutersPremium
Greece’s newly-appointed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras arrives holding flowers for a ceremony at the Kessariani shooting range site where hundreds of members of the Greek Resistance were executed by Nazi occupation forces during World War II in Athens. Reuters

Alexis Tsipras, the leftist political maverick who swept to power Sunday in Greece in a popular rebellion, formed a new coalition government on Monday with a right-wing fringe party that will charge immediately into the task of reversing wrenching austerity policies and negotiating with European leaders to reduce Greece’s debt burden.

Panos Kammenos, the leader of the coalition partner, Independent Greeks, told reporters shortly after meeting with Tsipras on Monday that the two had formed a new government. The Independent Greeks, who won 4.7% of the national vote, have often taken a hard line against austerity and might push for tough terms in any debt talks.

It was not immediately clear how the power would be shared, but Tsipras planned to go to the Greek presidential compound in the early afternoon to formally receive the mandate to form a government.

“I want to announce that from this moment the country has a government," Kammenos told reporters after about an hour of talks with Tsipras.

“The Independent Greeks give our vote of confidence to the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras," he said.

Kammenos added that Tsipras would visit President Karolos Papoulias later on Monday to be sworn in as prime minister and then announce the composition of the new government, “in which Independent Greeks will participate".

European finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday were expected to put the developments in Greece high on their agenda. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, told a German radio station Monday morning that he had congratulated Tsipras immediately after the election, but had told him that Greece should not expect significant financial concessions from creditors.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain was more blunt.

“The Greek election will increase economic uncertainty across Europe," Cameron tweeted.

With nearly all the votes counted, Tsipras’ Syriza party had won 36.3% of votes and secured 149 seats in the Greek parliament, short of the 151 that he needed to secure an outright majority.

The New Democracy party, led by the defeated incumbent prime minister, Antonis Samaras, took 27.8% of the votes. The neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, whose popularity has increased amid economic hardship, won 6.3% of votes, coming in third.

Syriza has become the first anti-austerity party to take power in a euro zone country and to shatter the two-party establishment that has dominated Greek politics for four decades.

Tsipras’s victory represented a rejection of the harsh economics of austerity. It also sent a warning to the rest of Europe, where continuing economic weakness has stirred a populist backlash, with more voters growing fed up with policies that have required sacrifices to meet the demands of creditors but that have failed to deliver more jobs and prosperity.

Now that he has formed a coalition, Tsipras must quickly determine which of his populist promises he can carry out quickly, setting up a likely showdown with Greece’s European partners. Tsipras has said he wants to negotiate directly with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other European leaders to reduce Greece’s debt burden.

Some officials, however, have characterized Tsipras’ demands as unrealistic and rife with the potential to drive Greece towards default or even out of the euro zone, the group that shares the currency.

Officials in Germany reacted swiftly, warning Greeks against abandoning their course of overhauls.

“The Greeks have the right to elect whoever they want; we have the right to no longer finance Greek debt," Hans-Peter Friedrich, a senior member of Merkel’s conservative bloc, told the daily newspaper Bild on Monday. “The Greeks must now pay the consequences and cannot saddle German taxpayers with them."

Tsipras’ victory prompted the opposition in Germany—the Greens and the Left party—to call on Merkel to change course and invest to spur growth. But Merkel’s grand coalition holds a large majority in parliament, and most Germans worry that any new talks with Greece will lead to a settlement that comes at the expense of Berlin.

In France, the victory was hailed by President François Hollande’s Socialist Party.

“The anti-austerity line is reinforced today in Europe," Philip Cordery, the party’s national secretary for European affairs, said in a communiqué. “Since 2012, François Hollande and the social-democratic leaders have been working to reorient the European Union. In Alexis Tsipras they have found a new ally."

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen, an opponent of European unification, also welcomed the Greek landslide, tweeting that it represented “the beginning of the trial of ‘euro-sterity’, the authority imposed for saving the euro".

Jens Bastian, a German economist who has lived in Athens since 1998 and worked for two years with a European task force for Greece, told Germany’s public broadcaster that the chances amounted to a historic shift for Greece.

Tsipras will first negotiate his own coalition, Bastian noted, and then turn to Brussels and Berlin. European leaders would respect the sovereign decision of the Greek electorate and most likely engage in a long series of talks with Athens, Bastian said.

Appearing before a throng of supporters outside Athens University late on Sunday, Tsipras, 40, declared that the era of austerity was over and promised to revive the economy. He also said his government would not allow Greece’s creditors to strangle the country.

“Democracy will return to Greece," Tsipras said to a swarm of journalists as he cast his ballot in Athens. “The message is that our common future in Europe is not the future of austerity."

 ©2015/The New York Times

Niki Kitsantonis in Athens and Melissa Eddy in Berlin contributed to this story.

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Published: 27 Jan 2015, 01:07 AM IST
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