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After Victory at Greek Polls, Alexis Tsipras Is Sworn In and Forms Coalition Government Vote Result Challenges More Than Austerity
(about 2 hours later)
ATHENS — Alexis Tsipras, the leftist political maverick who swept to power in Greece in a popular rebellion, was sworn in as the country’s new prime minister on Monday and immediately formed a new coalition government to charge into the task of reversing wrenching austerity policies and negotiating with European leaders to reduce Greece’s debt burden. ATHENS — Days before his emphatic victory in the Greek elections, Alexis Tsipras appeared at the final campaign rally of his left-wing Syriza party with a ponytailed Spaniard named Pablo Iglesias, whose own far-left political movement is now shaking up Spain.
Dressed in a blue shirt, a dark blazer and no tie, he strode calmly into Maximos Mansion, the seat of the prime minister’s office, and took a civil oath rather than a religious one to assume the leadership of the nation. The two men embraced like fellow insurgents, as speakers blasted the edgy lyrics of Leonard Cohen: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”
In his first act as prime minister, he laid roses at a monument to 200 Greeks executed by Nazis in May 1944 in the Athens neighborhood of Kaisariani. The act was a symbolic gesture that some interpreted as a prod to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has been insisting that Greece make austere sacrifices to pay its debts. “The wind of democratic change is blowing in Europe,” Mr. Iglesias, leader of the Podemos party in Spain, declared in Greek to a flag-waving throng of Syriza supporters. “Change in Greece is called Syriza. And change in Spain is called Podemos. Hope is on the way.”
Earlier Monday, Mr. Tsipras agreed to form a coalition government with a right-wing fringe party created in 2012 at the height of an economic crisis, Independent Greeks, which won 4.7 percent of the vote. The group has often taken a hard line against austerity and might push for tough terms in any debt talks with Greece’s creditors, whom party leaders have referred to as “foreign conquerors.” Like Mr. Tsipras’s Syriza Party, it has lobbied for Greece to press for war reparations from Germany. No doubt Berlin is paying close attention, and Brussels, too. The rise of Syriza is a challenge to Europe’s German-led economic policies of austerity, and Mr. Tsipras has vowed to renegotiate the harsh terms of Greece’s financial bailout with its creditors.
The group also shares Syriza’s goal of cracking down on corruption by public officials and has campaigned for the lifting of politicians’ immunity from prosecution. But it is also a pointed threat to the European political status quo, as a new generation of leaders — including Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy — emerges and anti-establishment parties on the right and left gather strength.
“The Independent Greeks give our vote of confidence to the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras,” Panos Kammenos, the leader of the coalition partner, told reporters after about an hour of talks with Mr. Tsipras. Indeed, many anti-establishment leaders on the far right — including Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Nigel Farage of the U.K. Independence Party in Britain — embraced Syriza’s victory as a triumph against European elites.
However, one point of potential conflict between the partners is immigration: Syriza wants more rights for migrants and asylum seekers, while Independent Greeks want to take a stronger stance against neighboring Turkey to stop a flood of would-be migrants from entering Greece. More confrontational efforts to curb immigration amid an economic downturn have strengthened Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which placed third in Sunday’s vote. If this reflected a healthy dose of political opportunism, the support from the far right also underscored how the anti-austerity movement provided a huge tent in which political lines were easily blurred. To form a government, Mr. Tsipras on Monday allied with a small center-right party, Independent Greeks.
Mr. Tsipras now has 15 days to hold a confidence vote in his government, and was expected to announce his cabinet later Monday or Tuesday. “Make no mistake, it is a huge ideological compromise,” Nick Malkoutzis, a political analyst in Athens, said. But, he added, “they have similar positions on how to approach the bailout. So although they disagree on everything else, this is the key to Syriza’s being right now.”
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 on Monday morning that he had congratulated Mr. Tsipras immediately after the election but had told him that Greece should not expect significant financial concessions from creditors. The Syriza victory comes as Germany’s dominance over European decision-making seems to be weakening, if only slightly. Despite the reported unhappiness of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the European Central Bank last week announced a trillion-euro program to buy government bonds in hopes of staving off deflation and stirring economic growth.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain was more blunt. “The Greek election will increase economic uncertainty across Europe,” he said on Twitter. At the same time, leaders in France and Italy have been demanding for months that the budgetary constraints of austerity be eased.
With nearly all the votes counted, Mr. Tsipras’s Syriza party had won 36.3 percent and secured 149 seats in the Parliament, short of the 151 that he needed for an outright majority. Now much attention will be focused on Mr. Tsipras, who was sworn in Monday as the new prime minister of Greece. Throughout the campaign, opponents depicted him as an inexperienced radical whose demand to renegotiate the bailout terms could backfire and wreck the country. Mr. Tsipras confronted that criticism directly in his acceptance speech on Sunday night, when he declared that his party would prove that it could govern responsibly and well.
New Democracy, led by the defeated incumbent prime minister, Antonis Samaras, took 27.8 percent of the votes. Golden Dawn party won 6.3 percent of the votes. “The new Greek government will convince people that this is not a catastrophe for the country,” he said. “Catastrophe is not imminent.”
Syriza is the first anti-austerity party to take power in a eurozone country and to shatter the two-party establishment that has dominated Greek politics for four decades. If so, many analysts say other upstart European parties will be beneficiaries. “It will make clear that these parties can come to power without destroying the country,” said Manuel Arias Maldonado, a professor of politics at Malaga University in Spain. “We are paying a lot of attention to Greece.”
Mr. 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. In Spain, the emergence of Podemos has been swift and unexpected. Founded early last year, Podemos won almost 8 percent of the Spanish vote in European parliamentary elections last May — which denied the governing conservative Popular Party and the opposition Socialists a majority of votes for the first time since Spain’s return to democracy in the late 1970s.
Now that he has formed a coalition, Mr. Tsipras must quickly determine which of his populist promises he can carry out quickly, setting up a likely showdown with Greece’s European partners — most notably Germany. Polls show that Podemos continues to gain ground as national elections approach — they are expected around November — and party leaders are hurriedly trying to build a nationwide political organization.
Mr. Tsipras has said he wants to negotiate directly with Ms. Merkel and other European leaders to reduce Greece’s debt burden. Like Syriza, Podemos has pushed an anti-austerity message and called for debt renegotiations with creditors, while Spain’s traditional parties have echoed their Greek counterparts by warning that Podemos is a threat to the country’s tentative economic recovery.
Some officials, however, have characterized Mr. Tsipras’s demands as unrealistic and rife with the potential to drive Greece toward default or even out of the eurozone, the group that shares the currency. Mr. Iglesias, a college lecturer, has been attacking the Socialists and arguing that only Podemos can provide a true alternative to the conservative Popular Party.
Officials in Germany reacted swiftly, warning Greeks against abandoning their course of overhauls. “It is clear that now there is a rift on the European question, between euroskeptics, whether they are on the left or the right, and those who believe that Europe needs to continue its political and economic construction,” said Pascal Perrineau, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.“This rift has nothing to do with the left-right split,” he added. “That is why both Ms. Le Pen and the left-of-the-left are delighted by what happened in Greece.”
“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 Ms. 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.” This broader political trend might explain why Ms. Merkel has praised Mr. Renzi and worked to develop a rapport with him, even as the Italian prime minister has regularly spoken out against austerity policies and gleefully praised the stimulus plan of Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank.
Mr. Tsipras’s victory prompted the opposition in Germany — the Greens and the Left party — to call on Ms. Merkel to change course and invest to spur growth. But Ms. 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 their expense. Mr. Renzi remains popular with Italian voters and has positioned himself as a rebel inside the system, as he pushes his left-wing Democratic Party further to the right — while challenging the European Union to allow Italy more flexibility in meeting budgetary requirements.
In France, President François Hollande invited Mr. Tsipras to meet with him in Paris, while Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party welcomed Syriza’s victory. Mr. Renzi and Mr. Tsipras have apparently never met, and the men, both 40, have their differences. Yet if Mr. Renzi has not endorsed a renegotiation of bailout agreements, whether for Italy or any other country, analysts say he will inevitably benefit from the hard-line push against austerity by Mr. Tsipras in Greece, and from the effort by Podemos in Spain.
“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.” “Renzi believes that European policy of fiscal austerity is excessive and wrong, which is similar to Tsipras,” said Guido Tabellini, a professor of economics at Bocconi University in Milan. “But that is about it. Their economic policies don’t have much more in common.”
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, an opponent of European unification, also welcomed the Greek landslide, writing on Twitter that it represented “the beginning of the trial of ‘euro-sterity,’ the authority imposed for saving the euro.” In Italy, the main anti-establishment party has been the Five Star Movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. But Mr. Grillo has seen his popularity dip as Mr. Renzi has steadily become the central figure in Italian politics. Mr. Renzi’s relationship with Mr. Tsipras will be closely watched.
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 might help Renzi to convince the E.U. to have fiscal policy less obsessed with balanced budget constraints,” Mr. Tabellini said, “while Italy can push Greece to start and boost reforms.”
Mr. Tsipras will first negotiate his own coalition, Mr. 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, Mr. Bastian said. Mr. Tsipras needs no reminder that he is unloved by the Greek political establishment that he thrashed. In a break with custom, the departing prime minister, Antonis Samaras of the conservative New Democracy Party, did not attend the swearing-in ceremony for his successor.
Appearing before a throng of supporters outside Athens University late Sunday, Mr. 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. According to a Syriza official, Mr. Tsipras found his prime ministerial office completely bare — with the safe open and empty. A political jab, no doubt, but also a reminder of the challenges ahead.
“Democracy will return to Greece,” Mr. 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.”