Greek voters punish main parties

Greece's two main parties have lost their parliamentary majority in Sunday's election. Parties opposed to the government's austerity measures were the real winners of the election night

Left demands end to austerity
The leftist parties declared that while the conservatives simply wanted to ease the course of austerity, they would renounce the cuts completely. Above all Alexis Tsipras, head of the "coalition of the radical left" (Syriza) managed to make political gains with this argument and he was the biggest winner in Sunday's vote. The coalition tripled the party's proportion of the vote to just under 17 percent, and Tsipras is now head of the second-largest party in the country, with his own plans for forming a coalition.
"This result is a message for massive change in Greece and in the whole of Europe," Tsipras declared before his supporters in Athens. The people of Europe should not go along with the "barbarity" of austerity. He added that leading politicians in Europe, above all German Chancellor Angela Merkel will have to own up to the fact that austerity has been defeated.
DW DE