Alexis Tsipras, the 40-year-old leader of SYRIZA, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left, was arguably the biggest winner of the past week. On Sunday, Jan. 25, his party received 36 percent of the vote and thereby claimed 149 seats at the Hellenic Parliament - just one shy of a single-party government. For close followers of Greek politics, the outcome was hardly surprising: The party's popularity had been steadily growing over the past decade, experiencing a big jump after the European sovereign debt crisis and the subsequent wave of anti-austerity protests in Greece. What might seem like a good idea over the short-term, however, places the entire continent at risk in the long run.Let's step back from the doomsday scenario for a minute and quickly glance over the reactions to the rise of a vocally anti-establishment party to power. "SYRIZA in Greece has won the election by promising that taxpayers in other European countries will pay even more to them. Rather daring," former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt tweeted hours after the unofficial results revealed the outcome. Ahead of his first official meeting with Tsipras, EP President Martin Schulz warned that, having won the election, SYRIZA will have to develop responsible policies in order to address the country's pressing problems. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, C.J. Polychroniou, a research associate with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, compared the new Greek government's economic agenda to the New Deal - in a positive way - while warning that failure to cut public debt will render any effort futile.Meanwhile in Turkey, the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has announced that they will follow the example of Greek radicals. "We salute SYRIZA and its young leader, Alexis Tsipras, that won the election in Greece with a brave agenda," CHP-Youth chairman İrfan İnanç stated last Monday. CHP chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu met with Alper Taş, the leader of the marginal Freedom and Democracy Party (ÖDP) best known for his recent (failed) effort to tackle a co-panelist on live television, in an effort to form a SYRIZA-like grand coalition of left parties in the country, Milliyet daily reported on Saturday. With regard to everyone else who is half a somebody among the opposition ranks, suffice it to say that there was no shortage of celebrations and bold comparisons between the SYRIZA victory and the Gezi Park protests. According to CNN Türk, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu congratulated his Greek counterpart over the phone and extended an invitation to visit Ankara.At this point, there are two fundamental approaches to the changes in Greek government: The first camp believes that SYRIZA, once in government, will have to part ways with romantic populism and come to terms with the cold facts - including that Greece still has to finish its vegetables. If there was any doubt, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (read: Mrs. Austerity) publicly ruled out that the newly-elected Greek government's refusal to cooperate with the EU-IMF troika will lead to "a further debt haircut." Others, however, believe that the SYRIZA experiment's anti-establishment background will leave Tsipras no choice but to slam his country into a concrete wall of economic and political turmoil. The fact that the new Greek prime minister's first order of business was to pledge an end to "the vicious cycle of austerity" was hardly promising. His commitment to re-hire 12,000 public employees and, wait for it, raise pensions did not exactly help him on the European front either.It remains to be seen how the SYRIZA experiment will play out but one thing is certain: The stakes are extremely high for the newly-formed government in Greece. If the anti-austerity campaign succeeds, Alexis Tsipras will become a household name in European politics - akin to the young Bülent Ecevit of the 1970s. Failure to either keep his promises to the Greek people or freak out European partners and investors, however, will spell the end of Europe's latest red scare. We hope for the former scenario but, deep inside, know that you can't have your cake and eat it too.