Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

What Syriza did, what Syriza will do next

The left-wing opposition Syriza Unifying Social Front (Syriza) won the pre-term general election held on January 25th, with 36.3% of the vote, a little ahead of recent polls. Syriza secured an important victory but its win was short of being decisive, and the party will have to form a coalition government. Tough negotiations with the country's lenders lie ahead and the new government's cohesion will soon be put to the test. We believe that a coalition of Syriza and the right-wing, anti-bail-out Independent Greeks (IG), which appears likely after the two party leaders reached agreement on January 26th, would be unstable and predict that such a government would collapse within a year.

In line with our expectations, Syriza's tally of 36.3% of the vote left it two seats short of being able to form a government independently, despite receiving a 50-seat bonus (in a 300-seat parliament) awarded to the party with the most votes. Syriza is currently projected to win 149 seats, two short of the 151 necessary for a parliamentary majority.

Election resultsa

Syriza's improved performance compared with the 2012 election comes on the back of a collapse in votes for the former junior coalition partner, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), which polled 4.7% compared with 7.6% previously, securing 13 seats. The vote share of the senior coalition partner, New Democracy (ND), also fell, by 2 percentage points, and it will be allocated 76 seats. A centrist formation, To Potami (The River), will be allocated 17 seats and Greece's hardline Communist Party (KKE) 15. Worryingly, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, whose leadership is incarcerated pending trial for criminal activities, registered only a marginal decline it its share of the vote, finishing third with 17 members of parliament (MPs).

Syriza's rise to power has been built on an anti-austerity platform that has coalesced a rather incongruous band of anti-bail-out, Eurosceptic and diverse radical left campaigners. The rhetoric of party leaders, even after winning on election night, has been confrontational and does not bode well for negotiations with the country's creditors. The Greek word for 'compromise', symvivasmos, has connotations of submissiveness and it is not a word that Syriza leaders, flushed with success, are inclined to use just now. Various Syriza representatives have said that they are not interested in talking to the troika of international lenders—the European Commission, IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB)—but only to European heads of state, and only on the issue of a write-off of Greece's debt. This might go down well with their own backbenchers, but is unlikely to impress the country's European partners.

The IG, a right-wing, anti-austerity splinter group from ND, looks likely to be Syriza's uneasy bedfellow in government. The Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, and the IG leader, Panos Kammenos, met the morning after the election and appear to have agreed the terms to form a coalition government. We expect Mr Tsipras to be appointed prime minister designate when he meets the Greek president on the afternoon of January 26th. The Syriza leader has said that he will announce the composition of the government later the same evening. The IG secured 13 seats, giving a Syriza-IG coalition a comfortable majority, with 162 seats. Syriza's choice of partner means that it will not have to temper its rhetoric, at least initially, as it would have been obliged to do had it chosen a centre-left or centrist partner. Anti-bail-out rhetoric aside, this will be a shaky alliance. The two parties agree on little else other than taking a hard stance on Greece's reform programme and on debt renegotiation. We expect to be reviewing our political outlook once the new government has been formed, but we maintain our view that it is likely to fall within 12 months.