ATHENS, Greece—Dressed in an open-collar shirt and blue suede shoes, Alexis Tsipras arrives at his party’s headquarters for a live Q&A session on Twitter. The session is moderated by a leftwing newspaper that normally sells less than 2,000 copies a day. But Tsipras is reaching a much bigger audience: Foreign camera crews pack the tiny studio, and soon the hashtag #asktsipras is trending worldwide.
Tsipras is Greece’s unlikely man of the moment.
His radical left Syriza party is poised to win Greece’s general election on Sunday — riding a wave of anger over austerity measures imposed as a condition for an international bailout. The telegenic Tsipras has long railed the loudest against the draconian cut-backs that have ruined countless Greek families, and he’s now reaping the rewards of a promise to scrap or renegotiate the bailout.
