May 14, 2012
After Greek voters rejected austerity in last week's election, plunging the country into a political crisis, Europe has been searching for a Plan B for Greece. It's time to admit that the EU/IMF rescue plan has failed. Greece's best hopes now lie in a return to the drachma. By SPIEGEL Staff
There are many things Alexis Tsipras likes about Germany. The leader of Greece's Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) party drives his BMW motorcycle to work at the Greek parliament in the morning, Germany's über-leftist Oskar Lafontaine is one of his political allies, and when it comes to his daily work, his colleagues have noticed a certain tendency toward Prussian-style perfection.
Tsipras could easily count as a friend of the Germans, if it weren't for the German chancellor. Greek magazines have frequently caricatured Angela Merkel dressed in a Nazi uniform, because she imposes her fondness for balanced budgets and austerity on the rest of Europe. The Greeks, says Tsipras, want to "put an end" to the Germans' requirements and their "brutal austerity policy."
Tsipras is the new political star in Athens. While the country's washed-up mainstream parties struggled for days to form a new government, the clever young politician has been dominating the headlines with his coalition movement of Trotskyites, anarchists and leftist socialists.
In the recent elections, Tsipras' Syriza party advanced to become the second-largest political force in the country, and Tsipras is making sure his gray-faced opponents from the Greek political establishment know it. Surrounded by cameras and microphones, he stood in the Athens government district last Tuesday, put on his winner's smile and called upon the two traditional parties, the center-left Socialists (PASOK) and the conservative New Democracy, to send a letter "to the EU leadership" and cancel the bailout deal that Athens made with the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Tsipras knows what many Greeks are thinking. At the end of last week, his poll numbers rose to a new record level of almost 28 percent.
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