6:26 PM: News agencies are reporting that the leftist Syriza party led by Alexis Tsipras has won Greece’s general election, with over three-quarters of polling results in.

Tsipras told a crowd of cheering supporters, “Greece has turned a page. Greece is leaving behind the destructive austerity, fear and authoritarianism. It is leaving behind five years of humiliation and pain.”

Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Mark Weisbrot called the win “a great example for the rest of the eurozone.”

“Voters have rejected prolonged mass unemployment and elected a new government with a mandate to negotiate a better deal. And this new government will have bargaining power. A government that is willing to stand up to the European authorities can really help Europe move away from economic policies that have been a miserable failure,” Weisbrot said.

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: Greeks headed to the polls on Sunday in a decisive election poised to see a win by the leftist Syriza party and deliver an anti-austerity message that could reverberate across the eurozone.

Final polls issued Friday showed the leftwing Syria party, led by 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, favored to win against incumbent Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ conservative New Democracy party.

Speaking from Athens on Saturday, attorney Dimitri Lascaris told the Real News Network that Syriza’s win appears inevitable; the question is whether it would garner a large enough majority in the unicameral parliament.

As Reuters reported, a Syriza win “would produce the first euro zone government openly committed to canceling the austerity terms of its EU and IMF-backed bailout program.”

“Democracy will return to Greece,” Tsipras said as he cast his ballot. “The message is that our common future in Europe is not the future of austerity.”

He later told the BBC that “the vicious circle of austerity is over.”

Reporting from Athens, France 24‘s Christophe Robeet said that “one thing is sure—everybody here is telling us that whether they like Syriza or whether they don’t like Syriza, this is a crucial election, which will have a very big impact on the future of Greece.”

The Associated Press reported: “Syriza has promised to renegotiate the country’s 240 billion euro ($270 billion) international bailout deal. It has pledged to reverse many of the reforms that international creditors demanded in exchange for keeping Greece financially afloat since 2010.”

Those “reforms” imposed by the Troika—the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Union—have been denounced by Tsipras as “national humiliation.” Others have criticized them as brutal cuts that have taken a severe toll on the population.

Fifty-four-year old Panagiotis, a self-employed electrician who had just voted for Syriza, told the Guardian, “There has to be change, big change. The economy has collapsed. Poverty has reached proportions … People, ordinary people like you and me, are poking around in dustbins to get food to eat. The young can only find work abroad. Syriza is Greece’s hope.”