Eurozone puts hard word on new Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

Leader of Syriza left-wing party Alexis Tsipras waves to his supporters outside Athens University Headquarters. Photo / AP

Eurozone finance ministers will warn Alexis Tsipras today that there will be no negotiations on debt relief for Greece unless his radical left-wing government promises to honour all existing austerity agreements.

Officials are convinced that the EU holds the trump cards in the forthcoming clash with the new Greek Prime Minister, including the nuclear option of letting banks collapse, and that Tsipras knows his weakness.

The hardline approach will be sugared with offers of flexibility on the detail of austerity measures, and a move to allow Greece more time to meet an end-of-February deadline for renewal of the key EU loans that are keeping the country's economy afloat.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch Finance Minister who chairs meetings of the Eurogroup, will set out a strategy aimed at playing for time by drawing the Syriza party into months of talks in the expectation that Tsipras will back down.

Greece's new far-left leader will be told that the eurozone will only begin talks if he accepts all previous agreements on cuts and economic restructuring, despite opposition to them having swept him and Syriza to power.

Syriza has pledged to reject austerity and cancel the country's billions of euros in debt. The party's victory is a resounding rebuff to the country's loss of financial sovereignty.

With 92 per cent of the vote counted, Greeks gave Syriza 36.3 per cent of the vote - 8.5 points more than conservative New Democracy party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. It means they will be able to send between 149 and 151 MPs to the 300-seat Parliament, putting them close to a majority. The final result was too close to call.

Syriza is now likely to become the first anti-austerity party in Europe to form a government. Samaras gave a brief statement in which he accepted the result and claimed he had put Greece back on the road to recovery.

Tsipras, 40, an admirer of Che Guevara, is expected to be Greece's youngest prime minister in 150 years. The party wants to roll back five years of austerity policies and cancel a large part of Greece's 318 billion ($480 billion) debt. If they fulfil the threats, Greece's membership of the euro zone could be in peril. Tsipras has toned down the anti-euro rhetoric he used during Greece's last election in 2012 and now insists he wants Greece to stay in the eurozone.

Austerity policies imposed by the EU and IMF have produced deep suffering, with the economy contracting by a quarter, youth unemployment rising to 50 per cent and 200,000 Greeks leaving. Tsipras has pledged to reverse many of the reforms that the hated "troika" of the EU, IMF and European Central Bank have imposed, including privatisations of state assets, cuts to pensions and a reduction of the minimum wage.