“No” to what?

Greek voters have rejected austerity. Whether they meant to or not, they may find out they have also rejected the euro.

IT WAS more than Greece's "No" campaigners could have hoped for—and it may turn out to be more than they bargained for. Alexis Tsipras, the radical left-wing prime minister, snatched an unexpectedly easy win in Sunday’s hastily arranged referendum on whether the country should compromise with its creditors, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, on a new bail-out deal. Going into the vote, opinion polls showed Mr Tsipras’s anti-austerity “No” camp just a shade ahead of “Yes” supporters, who included the main opposition parties. Yet supporters of Mr Tsipras’s fractious Syriza party rallied behind him: with more than 95% of the vote counted, "No" was ahead by 61.3% to 38.7%. The gap was so humiliatingly wide that Antonis Samaras, the former prime minister (unseated by Mr Tsipras in January) who had championed the "Yes" campaign, promptly resigned from the leadership of the centre-right New Democracy party.

The Economist

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