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In a show of anger at meddlesome foreigners, more than 60% ofGreeks voted for anti-bailout parties in Sunday's parliamentaryelections. The top vote-getter was still an establishedorganization, the conservative New Democracy party, which supportedthe bailout. However, it did not have enough seats to govern aloneand, on Monday, its leader Antonis Samara failed to form acoalition. And so Greece is now turning to the charismatic leaderof the buoyant leftist party that came in with the second-mostseats. On Tuesday Alexis Tsipras vowed to form an anti-bailout governingcoalition that he says will aim to cancel harsh the austeritymeasures imposed on the country by international lenders. He alsosaid he would nationalize the country's banks "The popular verdictclearly renders the bailout deal invalid," said Tsipras, 37, anengineer who leads Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza. Butcan he really form a working government? Syriza has already said it won't work with New Democracy or PASOK,the once-mighty Socialist party that ran Greece for many of thepast 30 years but came in an embarrassing third in Sunday'selection. Tsipras said he would only work with the two parties ifthey unreservedly rejected the bailout deal. "If they truly regretwhat they have done to the Greek people," he said, the two partyleaders should rescind their letters to creditors that guaranteedfull support of the bailout terms. (See photos of protests in Athens.) Tsipras, whose party won 52 seats in the 300-seat parliament, alsosaid he wanted coalition partners to discuss abolishing a law thatgives members of parliament immunity from prosecution. He alsopressed for an investigation into Greek banks and the establishmentof an international auditing committee to investigate the causes ofGreek debt. For all his enthusiasm, Tsipras is unlikely to win enough supportto form a governing alliance of leftist parties, the first suchcoalition in Greek history. The Communist Party of Greece hasalready said it won't join such an alliance. If Tsipras fails toform a government, the next party to try to fomr a coalition willbe PASOK. If it fails, there will be new elections next month.That's the most likely outcome, says Platon Tinios, an economist atthe University of Piraeus. "Everyone is pretending to form agovernment but what they're actually doing is preparing forelections again," Tinios said. "You need some time for politicaldevelopment to avoid the gridlock and the chaos that we're seeingnow but that's never going to happen if you're forever chasing thenext election." Giorgos Kountaroudis, 32, an architect in Athens, says he hopes newelections will drive out the most extreme parties, especially theultranationalist neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn who wonalmost 7% of the vote and at least 21 seats in parliament. Partymembers give Nazi salutes, and supporters have been linked toviolent attacks on the many undocumented immigrants living inAthens. Golden Dawn's rabid anti-immigrant and anti-bailoutcampaign seemed to resonate with disenfranchised Greeks, especiallythe young, but Kountaroudis says he hopes the party's showing "wasjust a crazy bubble. I don't want to believe that so many peoplewould vote for Nazis." He voted for Drassi, a pro-business centristparty that didn't win enough votes to get seats in parliament. Centrist parties are planning to combine forces and may have abetter shot in the next elections, which will likely be moreconclusive than the ones on Sunday, says Kevin Featherstone, aprofessor of Contemporary Greek Studies at the London School ofEconomics. "On Sunday what the electorate wanted to do was punish.But in the next stage, they're going to want to vote with solutionsin mind," Featherstone says. (Meet Loukanikos, Athens' protest dog.) In considering those solutions, politicians must also be realisticabout the dilemma Greece faces with the bailout terms, he says.Though the votes here and in France certainly rocked the eurozone'sausterity politics, Featherstone says the maximum Greece can expectfrom the EU are "modest adjustments" on the memorandum of agreementbetween Greece and its international lenders. Greece has receivedtwo bailouts totaling about $320 billion from the European Union,the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Itsgovernment also pushed through a massive bond swap with privatecreditors in March that cut Greek debt by about half. "The bottom line is that the money Greece needs to cover its debtand public sector all depends on the memorandum," Featherstonesays. If Greece doesn't keep cutting its budget according to thoseterms, it will likely run out of money by the end of the month,setting up the country for a disorderly default and a possible exitfrom the eurozone. "It is obvious that if the German do not shift from their positionsand if there are no convincing solutions in our country, [Sunday's]vote will be harbinger of the drachma," wrote Alexis Papachelas,editor of the Greek daily Kathimerini. "The arguments in favor offighting for the euro have to be set out." But it's hard to know who will make those arguments, since Sunday'selection virtually crushed Greece's political class. PASOK is nowin ruins, and a chastened New Democracy is struggling to keepitself together. Papachelas says Greece will face tough times inthe days and months ahead as the country struggles to find areplacement for a rotten political system that has collapsed.Kountaroudis, the architect, says he's happy to see that system go,even if it takes the euro with it. "We had good times, yes," hesaid. "But maybe we just weren't ready for the euro." See TIME's Pictures of the Week. See the Cartoons of the Week. I am an expert from promotional-waterbottles.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Food Safe Plastic Containers , Promotional Water Bottles Manufacturer, Polypropylene Water Bottles,and more.
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