“THE First Two Bills of a Syriza Government.”

That was the headline in Ta Nea, the historic paper of the centre-left in Greece which is traditionally loyal to Pasok, the equivalent of the Labour Party.

With two days to go before polls close on Sunday, the headline underscored the universal expectation that the left populist Syriza party will win and is set to form a government. It may have to rely on a coalition partner or govern as a minority administration.

Most polling before the weekend had Syriza just short of the 151 seats needed for an absolute majority.

But in the last two days you can sense a surge welling up across Greece, a tsunami of support for the left.

The old war horses of the right look exhausted. New Democracy — the party of the centre-right established after the fall of the colonels’ junta in 1974 — was a mass party.

It is visibly withering. As power slips from its grasp the internal fissures are growing, revealing three parties under one roof — a neoliberal party of business (led by the scion of the Mitsotakis clan), a patrician, national-liberal party (the Karamanlis wing) and a hard-right, national-chauvinist party (outgoing prime minister Samaras).

Without the cement of power and the patronage which flows from it, it is distinctly possible that the right will openly split.

The collapse of morale on the right is turning certain defeat into a possible rout in the context of a generalised swing to the left in the society.

Electoral tactics can be fraught for the left, where there are historically multiple expressions of working-class political interests.

Unlike Britain, for example, where the Labour Party has generally been the only political pole of the labour movement in the electoral sphere, Greece has for 40 years had a plurality of serious forces on the left.

There is the Communist Party of Greece, Pasok and, over the last 10 years, Syriza.

It encompasses a range of socialist traditions but was formed by its still-largest component Synaspismos, which emerged from the eurocommunist trend in the communist movement.

Additionally there are the explicitly anti-capitalist forces of the Antarsya coalition.

All are standing in the election. But this election campaign and the impending collapse of the right show that this is not a zero-sum game for the left.

The merchants of neoliberal austerity in Europe understand that the meaning of the Greek election is that the left is back — and not as some deracinated social democracy of the post-Blair type.

This is a left with large components which place themselves in the broad communist tradition, which in Greece was kept out of political power through civil war, military junta and systematic cold war intervention by Washington and London.

The position of Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras and the leading majority of the party is to seek a renegotiation of the austerity and neoliberal reform programme imposed on Greece by its discredited governments and the troika of the European Union Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The austerity “memorandums” were the condition for a bailout which did not benefit the Greek people but went straight into the hands of the bankers.

Those bankers created the financial house of cards which came tumbling down with Lehman Brothers over six years ago.

Tsipras says he wants to keep Greece in the euro single currency but lift the austerity and have large amounts of the unpayable Greek debt (now running at about 170 per cent of the economy’s size) written off or rescheduled.

In a policy which all economists agree is far from “soviet,” “anti-capitalist” or “revolutionary,” Syriza rejects the troika demand that it runs a budget surplus and uses the income from taxing working people and further slashing their pensions and wages to pay off debt.

Instead, it says it will run a balanced budget.

The London-based economist Costas Lapavitsas, who has advocated Greece leaving the euro as the only way in which its economy can be rebuilt from a 1930s-style depression, describes the policy as “mild Keynesianism.”

In fact, a Keynesian policy — mild or radical — would involve running a budget deficit, cutting taxes and increasing investment to create demand and boost growth.

As Syriza has come close to office, its spokespeople have more and more pointed to the need for a change in direction across Europe as a whole. The party’s election slogan is “Hope is coming. Greece is going forward. Europe is changing.”

So Tsipras welcomed the belated moves by the ECB on Thursday to finally follow the US Treasury and Bank of England in injecting cash into the banking system — known as quantitative easing (QE) — to stave off the imminent threat of falling prices and deflation of the kind which mired the world in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But the ECB’s Mario Draghi was extremely clear that this did not signal a change in the fundamentalist neoliberal thinking which continues to prevail in the European political class, in Germany above all.

First, the size of the cash injection turned out on inspection of the fine detail to be less than it seemed. Second, he said the main onus on returning Europe to growth was upon national governments.

These, he insisted, must do more to cut welfare expenditure and “reform labour markets.” In other words, they must slash workplace protection, eviscerate trade union organisation and drive working people further down an endless race to the bottom.

Third, he made it clear that Greece would get nothing from QE unless it accepted the continued national humiliation of being under the supervision of the IMF and co and signed up to as yet unspecified new conditions. And no help would be forthcoming even then until July, due to the current exposure of the bank to Greek debt.

So the squeeze is on Syriza even before it takes office. It is vicious.

And it is not susceptible to the moderate and highly reasoned arguments of Syriza’s negotiating team. The capitalist interests which benefit from the euro and the neoliberal policies which are hardwired into it are neither moderate nor reasoned.

There is counter-pressure too from the undefeated workers and social movements in Greece, whose militancy has blunted the privatisation programmes and “reforms” of the outgoing government and its predecessors.

There is also a left which is demanding a radical break with austerity and with the euro — the communist and anti-capitalist left which are embedded in those movements and the left in Syriza, comprising about 30 per cent at its congress.

The debates about how radically to break from austerity may seem like a luxury for us in Britain, where no potential governing party in May is promising any kind of break with the orthodoxy.

And our starting point is surely a broad front of solidarity with Greece and in opposition to austerity in Britain.

But the intense political clash in Europe will force us too to become more precise and serious in our arguments and policies, just as the intense scrutiny of a highly politicised and proletarian electorate in Greece is doing there.

The feeble pleading of the centre-left in Europe can already be heard. We’d like to help Greece, where there is a humanitarian crisis, but if we cut their debt then there will be a hole in the budgets of Germany, France, Spain, etc.

It would not be socialist to make Spanish workers pay for debt run up by the Greek oligarchs. Various Labour MPs are making similar noises in London.

It would not be a socialist policy to make the classroom assistant in Oldham pay for the debts of the Greek oligarchs.

That’s why in the spirit of solidarity we should demand that the Greek debt is dropped and the bankers are made to pay. The demand for taking the banks under democratic control is growing in Greece. It is not out of faux leftism.

Measures to break with capitalism become the only realistic policy.