GREECE’S new coalition government assumed its duties yesterday, pledging to enforce spending cuts and reforms demanded by the country’s creditors.

Labour Minister George Katrougalos said that the new administration had to focus on reforms that were a key condition for the latest international bailout.

“Until now the people knew us and backed us as a force of resistance to neoliberalism, establishment politics and corruption,” he said at a swearing-in ceremony for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s new government.

“Now we must prove that we are also a force for reform.”

Mr Tsipras won re-election despite a rebellion in his party after his remarkable policy U-turn in the summer, when he broke key promises to fight austerity and instead signed a new bailout with even more tax rises and income cuts.

“It would be naive to say that our path will be strewn with flowers,” Deputy Prime Minister Yiannis Dragassakis said. “It will be an uphill course.”