ATHENS—The victory of the leftwing Syriza party in Greece is sending shockwaves through Europe’s political establishment as popular resistance to the politics of austerity builds.

Syriza’s leader, 40-year-old Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras – who is also Greece’s youngest post-War leader – wasted no time this week putting Greece on a direct collision course with its creditors: the so-called Troika of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission.

“We won’t get into a mutually destructive clash, but we will not continue a policy of subjection,” Tsipras said after his government, which swept the polls on Sunday, announced it would roll back a series of questionable privatizations instituted by his predecessors in the center-right New Democracy Party.

The move halts mandated sell-offs that forced bankrupt Greece to privatize many of its assets across the country. These included plans to sell off Greece’s largest power utility and the country’s largest docks at the port of Piraeus – both demands of the E.U. and IMF in exchange for a record €240 billion ($278 billion) in bailouts.

Markets slid when it became clear Syriza’s leader would be backing up his talk with action. Europe’s core economic players – especially Germany – say they are defending their own taxpayers’ money, which they argue was spent in helping bail out southern European countries in the Eurozone.

“I always feel I have to apologize in Greece for having provided Greece with an extraordinarily large amount of aid. I'll say it explicitly: the German taxpayer has already contributed quite considerably toward the debt cut,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said this week in Brussels.

But what German politicians aren’t saying is that 90 percent of the bailout did not go to Greece. It mostly went to European banks, notes Hugo Radice, a professor of political economy at the University of Leeds in England, an expert on the fallout of the current global financial crisis.

“They completely ignore and conceal the role of their own banks, German banks, and indeed French and other north European banks, in reckless lending to Euro-peripheral governments,” Radice told Occupy.com.

Over the past several years, Radice argues, politicians have been willfully ignorant about the damage inflicted by austerity measures – cutting public expenditures in the face of recession – which fly in the face of Europe's basic economic principles developed over the past century.

“It’s almost as if things have to get incredibly bad – as they have done in Greece – before people are willing to consider maybe austerity is wrong,” Radice said.

“It’s become the common sense of the age. In most countries, Germany above all, it’s extremely difficult to challenge austerity.”

But the election of Syriza is changing that, and all eyes now turn to the new Greek government which plans to lead by example. The meteoric rise of the leftist Podemos party in Spain – a country with a similar level of unemployment, and which is also buckling under debt-imposed austerity policies – suggests a trans-European alliance of common cause.

“For the first time the people have voted for a government which is clearly against austerity,” Alex Merlo, a Podemos party operative in Greece who observed the election in Athens, told Occupy.com. “We think this opens a new period in which hopefully people will gather new hope to struggle against austerity, and it creates very big contradictions inside the European Union so we salute this big step forward for the Greek people.”

That Greece’s electorate would tilt to the left in search of solutions to unreasonably harsh European economic policies could not be taken for granted. Anti-European sentiment has been rising in many countries; the ascendance of France’s far-right National Front is a testament to this.

In Greece, the ultranationalist Golden Dawn ran on a platform against austerity and chose to target migrants as scapegoats for Greece’s economic woes. The party polled only about 6 percent – about 150,000 votes less than in last year’s European parliamentary election – but is still considered a political force.

“It is obvious that Golden Dawn lost its electoral dynamic but manages to keep its voters within the party's strongholds,” Vasiliki Georgiadou, a professor of political science at Panteios University in Athens, told Occupy.com by email.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the Eurozone, political forces are seeing the galvanizing power of standing up to unpopular austerity measures imposed on Eurozone members.

In Ireland, nationalist Sinn Fein has made electoral gains by rejecting austerity measures in what’s seen as a move to replace divisive sectarian politics with economic programs that cut across many fault lines – religious, political and social – which have long complicated Irish politics.

It’s a prospect that excites observers like Radice, who sees a European left that is finally finding its voice after many years of being marginalized by a politics of consensus – in which traditional, center-left social democratic parties adopted neo-liberal policies favored by financial elites.

“Whether it can get anywhere I think depends on repeating the Syriza victory in other parts of Europe,” he said.

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