Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras promised to “radically change” government policy at his first cabinet meeting yesterday as ministers put the brakes on five years of reckless cuts.

Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis announced that the ministry’s cleaners — who have been fighting a legal battle for reinstatement since being laid off in 2013 — would be rehired.

The demonstrating cleaners cheered as the minister revealed the move on television.

Mr Varoufakis said the ministry would still cut costs, but by reducing the number of financial advisers.

The planned privatisation of the port of Piraeus was also halted and an enormously unpopular sell-off of a stake in the Public Power Corporation (PPC) was blocked.

Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis assured the nation that the privatisation would be “halted immediately.”

Some laid-off public-sector workers would have their jobs restored — most likely those whose redundancies have already been ruled unconstitutional by courts — and cuts to pensions would be reversed.

“What we have said during the election campaign will be our guide,” Deputy Social Security Minister Dimitris Stratoulis said, though he added that Athens would start with “measures that do not have large spending impact.”

Mr Tsipras said he had a four-year plan ready that would balance the budget and hoped to discover “realistic proposals” to make loan repayments easier to bear.

But it is unclear what Greece’s new government will do if the EU, IMF and European Central Bank “troika” totally refuse debt renegotiation, since Syriza has ruled out leaving the euro or the EU itself.

The Communist Party of Greece said that the “crumbs” offered by the new cabinet would not offer “real relief.”

And it warned that the commitments to “the EU, the agreements with the ‘partners’ and balanced budgets” indicated the government would follow “the same path that brought us to bankruptcy.”

A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that the EU’s top power was in no mood to budge on austerity.

She was looking forward to hearing how Syriza planned “the continuation of the current programme and how to fulfil Greece’s obligations,” said spokesman Steffen Seibert.