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Initial policy announcements by Tsipras are strikingly radical. On domestic policy, he immediately stopped further privatizations, including of port facilities, and doubled the minimum wage. He announced free electrical service for 300,000 of the country's poorest families. There will be food aid and efforts to create jobs in a country where a quarter of the workforce is unemployed. Unpopular property taxes will be cut, but will be more than made up for by a crackdown on Greece's notorious practice of tax evasion by the rich, and higher taxes on the wealthy. In the past Syriza has promised to tax the country's wealthy shipping industry, which currently pays no income tax.

The new government plans to go to the Troika, not hat in hand, but with new demands, including the repayment by Germany of a "loan" that Greece was forced to hand over to the Nazis when they occupied the country during World War II. Greece will ask for new conditions for the repayment of its current bailout loans, amounting to a renegotiation and a moratorium on current payments.

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Among the Greek and European ruling classes, reactions to the election mix panic and rage. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble declared that the Troika and Germany would not budge from their harsh position toward Greece: that the Greeks have only themselves to blame for their current sufferings caused by irresponsible and dishonest management of their economy by past governments. The fact that Syriza has raised the issue of Nazi German despoiling of Greece during World War II, for which Greece was never compensated, did not improve the mood in Berlin. Other ruling-class figures threaten to push Greece out of the European Union.

If Tsipras sticks to his guns, there will be a mobilization of right-wing forces in Europe and beyond. The European ruling class does not just fear what might happen in Greece, it fears the example Greece might give to other poor nations such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, which might throw over the Troika regime of austerity and privatization and demand that the crisis of capitalism not be balanced on the backs of workers and the poor.

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