Tsipras emerges as clear winner in shock election result

By Peter Foster, Europe editor, Athens

Greece’s radical former prime minister Alexis Tsipras looked destined to be returned to office on Sunday night after his far-left Syriza party won a clear victory in Greece’s general election.

Despite a tepid campaign that saw Mr Tsipras’s personal popularity fall sharply, preliminary results showed the 41-year-old’s far-left Syriza party had won sufficient seats to form a coalition government in the coming days.

After a tight race Syriza ran out comfortable winners, with initial projections showing them falling only five or six seats short of the 151 seats needed to govern.

With results coming in centre-right Independent Greeks party was already signaling their willingness to team up with Mr Tsipras. “We will participate in the next government,” a spokesman said.

Whatever coalition is formed, the government will be faced with the daunting challenge of implementing the stringent reforms demanded by the €86bn bail-out package agreed to in July.

The programme has already split Syriza and in recent weeks cracks have begun to appear even among those MPs who remained loyal Mr Tsipras.

“This is a fragile party, although one third of the members broke off there are still radical elements left who can create problems for Tsipras,” said Marco Vicenzino, a Greece expert at the Global Strategy Project, a risk consultancy.

The disappointing result for Mr Tsipras came at the end of a month-long campaign that failed to engage weary Greek voters who were making their third trip to the polling booths for a major vote in just nine months.

Polling stations across Athens were almost eerily quiet in some places with Alco, the pollster, estimating that around 40 per cent of Greece’s 10 million voters had “abstained” by not turning out to vote.

Casting his vote earlier in the day, Mr Tsipras has called for a mandate for a “strong government” that could last four years and help Greece force through the reforms required to put the country back on a path to prosperity - he did not get his wish.

After voting, Mr Tsipras struck an altogether more sombre tone than in January when he was elected prime minister on a wave of euphoria, promising to force Greece’s Eurozone creditors to back down over its austerity demands.

In the event Mr Tsipras was forced to sign up to a package of reforms that will test any governing coalition to the limit as Greeks are asked to endure a ferocious round of tax hikes, pension cuts, privatisations and labour reforms in order access further bailout funds and possible debt relief.

The new Greek government will have only a matter of weeks to pass legislation cementing the 60 “prior action” laws needed to retain the confidence of creditors that was so badly damaged during July’s crisis negotiations.

Two women exit from the election booths as they cast their vote at a polling station in Athens

We need a “fighting government” Mr Tsipras added, warning of the "confrontations” ahead that would be necessary in order to “move forward with reforms”.

Mr Tsipras’s failed brinkmanship with Europe was the target of attack by New Democracy, the conservative establishment party that closed a 15-point gap with Syriza in the course of the campaign, but looked to have lost by 2 or 3 per cent according to exit polls.

Casting his vote earlier, Vangelis Meimarakis, the 61-year-old New Democracy leader and former defence minister, had called for voters to banish the “falsehoods and misery” of the Syriza era, and bring in “authentic people” who could competently run the country.

In the end it the Greek public – while clearly disgruntled with both Syriza and politics in general – were apparently not prepared to return to an establishment party that is widely blamed for the corruption and clientelism that brought Greece to its knees./Telegraph