Anti-euro, pro-drachma party Popular Unity told: form a government if you can

An explicitly anti-euro, pro-drachma party has assumed the process of attempting to form a government in Greece, four days after prime minister Alexis Tsipras resigned to pave the way for snap elections.

Panagiotis Lafazanis, the Marxist former energy minister who on Friday formed his own movement of rebels after breaking ranks with Tsipras’s far-left Syriza party, was given a mandate to try to forge a new administration by president Prokopis Pavlopoulos.

The new leader wasted no time in using the opportunity to lambast his former comrades. “We denounce these ‘express’ elections and a government that resigned so that we would go into an electoral process of only a few weeks,” Lafazanis told Pavlopoulos, claiming the poll was a deliberate bid to keep Greeks in the dark over the terms attached to the bailout accord Tsipras agreed with creditors earlier this month.

“We will use this mandate to demonstrate that a consistent anti-memorandum government can, and must, exist in this country. We will use [it], first and foremost, to speak with society and social organisations.”

The newly-created anti-bailout force, christened Popular Unity by the rebels, has three days to attempt to establish a government under a constitutional decree that is automatically extended to parliament’s second and third biggest parties when a leader resigns.

A previous attempt by Evangelos Meimarakis, who heads the centre-right New Democracy party, ended in failure earlier on Monday after he was unable to muster the necessary MPs for a working majority in the 300-member parliament.

Lafazanis, 63, acknowledges there is little chance of successfully forming a government, but his determination to go through the motions – conducting talks with unions and other labour groups – offers proof that he is bent on spreading his anti-austerity message. The country has suffered record poverty and loss of output since it was forced to seek help from the EU and International Monetary Fund to shore up its debt-stricken economy.

The bailout, the third in five years, could result in up to €86bn (£63bn) of emergency loans being extended to Greece but only if it keeps to budget targets that are by far the toughest yet.

With elections almost certain to take place on 20 September, Lafazanis used receipt of the mandate to launch his campaign.

“Developments are not only about party leaders,” said the politician who has accused Syriza of betraying the anti-austerity platform on which it was elected in January. “There is a whole society … that is keenly interested in its future and the survival of the country.”

Tsipras, who took the surprise step of calling the election after hardliners refused to endorse the rescue package in a move that stripped the government of its parliamentary majority, says a fresh mandate is now crucial to implementing the agreement.

“Our electoral goal is a clear, four-year tenure,” he told his party’s political secretariat on Monday. “Our aim is to win the confidence of people, to enforce a programme of progressive changes for the gradual liberation of the country from [foreign] oversight and memoranda.”

The credit ratings agency, Moody’s, described Tsipras’s resignation as “credit positive”. Alpona Banerji, Moody’s vice-president, wrote in a paper: “It offers the possibility of a new more cohesive government, which would improve the prospects for implementing the third bailout package and reducing liquidity and funding risks.”

But analysts are warning that surprises could be in store. Although the rebels do not have the reach of their erstwhile political allies, they have the moral high ground.

Many Greeks would not want to see their country exit the euro area – a course Popular Unity believes would be preferable to the stringent terms set as the condition for remaining in the euro – but they have been shocked by Syriza’s embrace of the policies it had pledged to oppose.

“Lafazanis may not be young and fresh-faced but he will appeal to older members of Syriza appalled by the party’s U-turn and do better than expected,” said Dimitris Keridis, professor of political science at Athens’s Panteion University.

“A third of Greeks want a return to the drachma and Lafazanis will express them and the 62% who voted against austerity in [the July] referendum.”

Syriza’s breakup will make it much harder for Tsipras to form an expected coalition after the election. Close aides have ruled out entering a power-sharing arrangement with other pro-European groups while the small rightwing Independent Greeks, Syriza’s junior partner in government for the past seven months, may well not cross the 3% threshold required to enter parliament.

A survey published in the German tabloid Bild – the first opinion poll to be released since Tsipras’s dramatic move last Thursday – showed the dissidents garnering 8% of the vote. Although Syriza came in with 28%, New Democracy, its main rival, was not far behind with 25%.

“Tsipras may well come first but Lafazanis will cut his base and make it very hard for him to attain an absolute majority,” said Keridis. “In my view, the political elite of Athens is over-estimating Tsipras as the hegemon [of the political scene], the new force that will transform Greece.”

The prospect of Greece being plunged into further instability was reinforced by leading Syriza cadres who said the crisis-plagued country may well be forced to go to elections again if next month’s vote is inconclusive.