ATHENS: Greeks voted Sunday in a tough-to-predict general election that threatened to turn the crisis-hit country's old political system on its head and bring eurozone turmoil back with a vengeance.
After two years of austerity cuts, polls show that voters will punish the two main parties, the left-wing Pasok and conservative New Democracy, for promising more savings in return for two bailouts worth 240 billion euros ($314.0 billion).
Instead, around half of the vote could go to 30 smaller parties, raising the prospect of protracted coalition negotiations for likely poll winner Antonis Samaras of New Democracy (ND), or even fresh elections.
“I am going to vote one of the small parties. I have had enough of ND and Pasok,” said psychology student Maria, 22. “Ever since I was born people have just voted for them.
“We will see if the Greeks have enough sense to choose parties other than the two big ones that have left Greece in such a state,” doctor Efthimis Karadimas, 43, told AFP at a busy polling centre in the capital.
Both Pasok and ND have said they want the “troika” of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank to cut Greece more slack in their bailout deals. Many of the smaller parties want to tear up the agreements.
“After two years of barbarism, democracy is coming home,” said Alexis Tsipras, the head of the leftist Syriza party, expected to pick up around 10 percent of the vote. “The people will send a loud and clear message to all of Europe.” Pasok head Evangelos Venizelos, a former finance minister who helped negotiate Greece's second bailout earlier this year, was booed as he voted in his constituency in Thessaloniki, with one heckler shouting “thief”.
Greece's creditors, not least paymaster-in-chief Germany, the main proponent of austerity before growth — despite growing criticism across Europe — have little appetite to loosen the bailout terms, let alone consider a third rescue.
With Athens having committed to finding in June another 11.5 billion euros in savings through 2014, any ambition to renegotiate terms “suggests a degree of liberty they do not have,” Swiss bank UBS said in a research note.
In ominous comments widely quoted by Greek newspapers on Saturday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that if Greece's new government deviated from its commitments, the country would “bear the consequences.””Membership of the European Union is voluntary,” he said in Cologne.
