ATHENS—Greece’s radical leftist Syriza party was poised to win a historic victory in national elections Sunday as exit polls showed voters rejected a ruling party that had implemented Europe’s harsh austerity medicine.
Syriza appeared to win between 35.5% and 39.5% of the vote, trouncing the incumbent New Democracy party, which managed to secure just 23% and 27% of the vote, according to the exit polls, which were issued immediately after voting booths closed.
But the polls also showed that voters backed a handful of smaller parties—ranging from the extreme right Golden Dawn party to the centrist To Potami party—making it unclear whether Syriza would win an absolute majority in Greece’s 300 seat legislature. According to the polls, Syriza was projected to secure between 146 to 158 seats, depending on the final outcome.
The elections are expected to have lasting repercussions for both Greece and the eurozone. Syriza, which emerged as the main opposition party in mid-2012 at the depths of the nation’s debt crisis, has promised to tear up the austerity program that Athens pledged in exchange for a EUR240 billion ($269 billion) bailout from international creditors.
Since first seeking a bailout in 2010, Greece has undertaken a broad sweep of revamps and cutbacks that have helped fix its public finances and nudged the economy back to growth following six years of deep recession. Those cutbacks have come at a cost: Some 25% of Greeks remain jobless, while a quarter of households live close to the poverty line.
Syriza has promised to change all that: pledging immediate relief to the poor, rolling back unpopular taxes and negotiating a debt write-down with the country’s creditors to free up spending on social programs.
Syriza’s promises to roll back many of those overhauls and its demands for debt relief from Greece’s international creditors have also stoked fears of an open clash with eurozone partners that could lead to the country’s exit from the common currency and once again rattle financial markets world-wide. In the past three months, Greece’s financial markets have shed roughly a fifth of their value, while nervous depositors have withdrawn several billions of euros from the country’s banking system.
Under Greece’s electoral law, the winning party is awarded 50 bonus seats in the country’s 300-member Parliament, a measure aimed at facilitating the stability of an elected government. But even with that bonus, Syriza doesn’t look as if it will have enough seats to form a government on its own.
