Greece election: Alexis Tsipras is the clear winner but still needs coalition partner for Syriza

Expect Greece to be a complete vassal state now that Alexis has sealed victory.

 

The campaign was a cliffhanger, but Alexis Tsipras is celebrating a second election victory, won despite months of turbulence and a disastrous policy U-turn which saw him abandon his attempt to defy Brussels and instead sign up for another harsh Brussels bailout.

Despite a strong campaign by its new leader Vangelis Meimarakis, the conservative New Democracy party improved only slightly on its performance in January, and with 50 per cent of the vote counted, was trailing Mr Tsipras’s Syriza by 28 per cent to 35.5 per cent.

Greece Gambles On “Catastrophic Armageddon” For Europe, Warns It “Only Has Weeks Of Cash Left”

One of the bigger problems facing the new, upstart Greek government, which has set before itself the lofty goal of overturning 6 years of oppressive European policies and countless generations of Greek cronyism, corruption and tax-evasion is not so much the concern about deposit outflows and bank runs – even though it most certainly will be in the next few days unless the Tsipras government finds some resolution to the dramatic standoff with Merkel and the ECB – but something far more trivial: running out of money.

Recall that two weeks into the Greek elections, Greece was rocked by a dire, if entirely underappreciated development, when its already “tax-paying challenged” population decided to completely hold off paying any taxes in advance hopes that the Tsipras government will “overturn” austerity. We wrote:

… while there will be no official confirmation whether Greece did or did not have a bank run for months, unless of course some bank keels over and dies in the interim, one thing is certain: with an increasing probability they may not have a “continuity-promoting” government in less than two weeks, Greeks tax remittances to the government, which were almost non-existent to begin with, have ground to a halt!