Updated at 10:30 p.m. ET
Greece's radical left Syriza party has become the first anti-austerity party to win elections in Europe, throwing into doubt whether the troubled country stays the course on an international austerity plan.
The party fell just short of an absolute majority, NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports for our newscast unit, and will have to work with another party to govern.
"This is a historic win because it's a direct challenge to Eurozone policies," Joanna says. "But everyone is wondering how Greece, which is deeply in debt, will stay solvent without those loans.
Official results from 80 percent of the polling stations put Syriza, led by 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, at 36 percent, comfortably ahead of the 28 percent for New Democracy, the center-right party led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.
As the results came in, Tsipras told cheering supporters that five years of austerity — which he called "humiliation and suffering" — were over, The Associated Press reports.
The centrist Potami (River) party trails, along with the far-right, Nazi-inspired Golden Dawn. When all the votes are counted, Syriza may have won the 151 seats needed to have a majority in the 300-member parliament. However, if the party can't reach that threshold, it would have to woo allies to form a government.
Meanwhile, the euro slipped further against the U.S. dollar and other major currencies in early trading in Asia in response to the news that Syriza was the likely winner. On Monday in Auckland, New Zealand, the EU's common currency, which is used by Greece and 18 other nations in Europe, weakened by 0.3 percent to nearly its lowest level in 11 years.
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In 2010, as Greece was on the verge of a default on its sovereign debt, Athens agreed to unpopular austerity measures in exchange for billions of euros from its fellow European Union countries and the International Monetary Fund. The measures have cut salaries and pensions. Even so, public debt has climbed from 146 percent of GDP in 2010 to more than 175 percent of GDP last year — the second-highest in the world, Reuters notes.
As Joanna Kakissis, reporting for NPR from Athens, says: "More than a quarter of Greeks are unemployed. Four years of austerity ... have crushed the economy. Greeks are now poised to elect Syriza, a leftist party that calls austerity 'fiscal waterboarding.' "
As The Associated Press reports:
The Guardian adds:
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