Greeks in high spirits despite Sisyphean task lying in wait

"I could not have expected this. That little boy! And now, he is the leader of Greece!" The old man struggled to hold back his tears, in vain. He had to wipe his eyes with his hand.  Over forty close and distant relatives carrying the same surname as the new prime minister of Greece live in the village of Athamanio, eight hundred meters up on the Tzoumerka Mountains in the Epirus region. The old man was sitting at the "leftist" coffee shop in this village of some nine hundred inhabitants. At another table, another Tsipras, an almost centenarian priest, a great uncle of Alexis Tsipras, recounts how most men in the village joined the leftist resistance under the National Liberation Front (EAM) to fight against the Germans in the Second World War and how "when the Germans left, [rightist] EDES took over? I waited almost a century to see a leftist government and now my prayers are vindicated." Not all of Tsipras' relatives have voted for him, but, like the rest of the village, their political preferences tilted towards the right.

It has been less than a week that Greece has been governed a leftist party calling itself the Radical Coalition of the Left (Syriza), along with a junior partner, the conservative party of Independent Greeks (ANEL). This sudden but not unexpected change of political balances in Greece has shocked Europe. In a period of economic stagnation and political turbulence in the zone of Euro, Alexis Tsipras' party is turning a new page by challenging the austerity and disciplinarian recipes imposed primarily by Germany on the debt-ridden south. After five years in the straight-jacket of a bail-out program, which has sent almost half of its citizens under the poverty line, Greece now under a new government will try first to persuade Brussels that...