The Nation: It's morning in Greece

About Syriza's victory

Maria Margaronis begins,

It was an amazing moment. 

In the Syriza campaign tent in central Athens last night, tall Germans from Die Linke, Italian communists waving their Bandiera Rossa, Podemos activists from Spain, a French couple with a Tricolore, they all clapped and swayed and danced with ecstatic Greeks. 

Strangers wept for joy in one another’s arms. 

Three young Canadians asked me where “the red party” was; a French woman hugged me and said, “Merci, les Grecs.” Rainbow flags waved among the red and purple; people were pogoing and dancing the tsifteteli side by side. 

The square in front of Athens University, where so many protest marches have begun, filled up with people, cameras, flags, waiting for Alexis Tsipras to make his victory speech. 

A giant banner proclaimed Kalimera Grecia e Europa (Good Morning Greece and Europe); a home-made placard read Gute Nacht Frau Merkel. 

So many Greek faces—faces that have been drawn and grey and anxious now for years—were lit up with an energy that felt half new and half remembered. 

Everyone knows it’s going to be hard, but something vital has been won—a battle against fear, for hope, for change.

Not the kind of morning the American right celebrated with Reagan's victory.

Just the opposite.

Morning for the people.

Well, we hope so.

Greeks want "a normal country."

Talking to people voting yesterday in different Athens neighborhoods, from working-class Nea Ionia to leafy Psychiko, one common theme emerged. 

The old corrupt practices—the godfather politics, the jobs for votes, the backroom union deals, the bribes under the table, the yards of red tape and, above all, the asphyxiating power of Greece’s oligarchs, who buy politicians by the dozen and feed the population a debilitating diet of pap on their private TV channels—all that has to go. 

Tsipras’s promises over the last few months to attack the deep subterranean network of financial and political interests that Greeks call “the entanglements” has won him the support of young and middle-class voters who might never have voted for a left party before. 

The young, the middle-aged, the unemployed, private- and public-sector workers whose lives have been blighted by a culture in which you can’t get a job or a contract unless you have the right connections, all say they want meritocracy, transparency, dignity: to become a “normal” country.

And if the only way to do that is to vote for a radical party with a "central committee," so be it.

Oh, about Europe.

Marine Le Pen of the French Front National said last week that she was rooting for Syriza to win to strengthen Euroskepticism. 

But Syriza is emphatically not a Euroskeptic party, which is one reason why the Greek Communist Party will have nothing to do with it. 

Its aim—and the aim of the thousands of European leftists and left sympathizers who were celebrating in Athens last night—is not to destroy the Union but to reclaim it from the bankers and the money men for the European people.