The legacy of Tsipras’s four-year tenure in Greece

Athens, Greece | AFP |  As the longest-serving prime minister of the Greek bailout era, and also the youngest in 150 years, Alexis Tsipras found himself applying unpopular austerity cuts dictated by the country’s creditors after a stunning policy U-turn in 2015.

But over four years, his government also sought to combat poverty and introduced several rights-related reforms to bring Greece closer to many of its secular western European peers.

As Greece prepares to vote in snap national elections on Sunday, here is a summary of the issues that have marked his term:

– Economic achievements –

The leftist Syriza government took a lot of flak for nearly crashing the country out of the euro in an ill-fated confrontation with the country’s creditors in 2015 under maverick then-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

In the four years that followed, Syriza sharply increased taxes to build a fiscal surplus demanded by the creditors, but also promoted income redistribution programmes to help the poor with rent, electricity benefits, and school meals.

The economy inched out of recession and unemployment fell from nearly 26 percent when Syriza took power to 18 percent this year.

– North Macedonia deal –

Cherished by Tsipras as his proudest achievement after the economic upturn is the breakthrough with the neighbouring former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that ended a 27-year name dispute.

In June 2018, Tsipras and his Skopje counterpart Zoran Zaev signed a hard-won deal that added “North” to Macedonia’s name to distinguish it from a bordering province in Greece.

It was an achievement that would see both leaders nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize — but it sank Tsipras’s coalition government with a small nationalist party and weakened him in Greece’s populous north.

– Civil unions –

Tsipras has been Greece’s youngest prime minister in 150 years and the first avowed atheist, with a spate of pioneering equal rights reforms on his watch.

Soon after coming to power in 2015, Tsipras extended cohabitation rights to same-sex couples. Surrogate parental rights were later granted as well.

And for the first time, transgender people were given the right to legally determine their chosen sex on official documents.

– Church-state relations –

Tsipras had less success in an attempt to loosen links between the state and the powerful Orthodox Church of Greece.

In November, he and the head of the Church, Archbishop Ieronymos, announced a tentative agreement to change the way clerical salaries are paid by the state, and to jointly develop disputed lands.

But the agreement fell through a few months later when Ieronymos was overruled by the Holy Synod, the governing body of the Church of Greece.

Tsipras had earlier angered the Church with plans to change the constitution and define the Greek state as “religion-neutral” while also allowing state officials to take a non-religious oath of office. Tsipras himself was the first Greek PM to take a political oath upon his election.

– Cannabis –

Tsipras’s government in 2017 legalised the use of cannabis for medical purposes, and followed this up by granting licences for the cultivation and processing of medical cannabis a year later.

– Fire and flood tragedies –

Arguably the worst disasters to befall Tsipras’s premiership was the deadly July 2018 wildfire that killed 102 people in Mati near Athens, and a flood in Mandra, on the outskirts of the capital, that left 23 dead a few months earlier.

The government tried to partially blame severe climate conditions and poor planning on both occasions, but could not escape widespread condemnation for perceived failings by state agencies.