80 European Journal of Criminology 18(1) The Syriza-led coalition government went on to reject the terms of the second loan package, to which the Troika responded by shutting off the transfer of liquidity to Greek banks. Although a four-month extension of the loan agreement was subsequently agreed, its termination point was breached in June 2015, reportedly making Greece the first advanced economy to technically default on a loan from the International Monetary Fund. The country was thrown into a liquidity crisis and found itself on the brink of bankruptcy and exit from the Eurozone. Stringent bailout conditions proposed by the Troika were then put to the people in a referendum held in early July. However, although Syriza openly campaigned in favour of a ‘No’ vote and celebrated its resounding victory in public, the Syriza-led government proceeded to strike an agreement with the Troika for a new, third financial package that was even more biting in its requirements than the one rejected in the referendum itself. The bill that formally enacted the third package was passed only with votes from opposition parties, as dozens of Syriza MPs chose not to toe the party line. In an effort to purge dissenters and secure a retrospective mandate for what was widely being described amongst the Left as a humiliating capitulation, the government called snap elections for September. Because the combination of inflowing centrist votes and an extremely high abstention rate helped to counterbalance the electoral repercussions of en masse defections from the party, Syriza once more won the majority at the ballot box, at 35.4 percent, yet not the number of seats required to govern on its own. Just as before, a coalition was immediately forged with the Independent Greeks as a weak partner, and Syriza was back at the helm of the country, its strategy being to implement the loan agreement while at the same time running a ‘parallel programme’ of welfare measures that would cushion the impact of austerity on the poorest segments of the population. Syriza stayed in power until July 2019, when it lost the next national election to the right-of-centre New Democracy party by a wide margin. Syriza’s defeat came, at least in part, as a result of growing ire amongst the public, and especially amongst leftist constituencies, regarding the introduction in May 2017 of further austerity measures in the context of what was in effect, but not in name, a fourth bailout package dictated by the Troika. Waiting for the Left: Why hope was ‘on the way’ with Syriza The ascent of Syriza into office raised the prospect of a new, less punitive and more humane direction in the Greek state’s use of incarceration. This was due to a combination of three factors: first, the composition of the core of the party’s membership; second, modes of activism in which prominent members of the party had long been regularly engaged; and third, the substance and tenor of the party’s manifesto in the build-up to the election of early 2015. From its very beginning in 2004, Syriza established itself as a political force deeply concerned with promoting grassroots reforms to criminal justice in general and the prison system in particular, a concern that gradually extended to issues relating to immigration detention as well. This was no surprise given that Syriza emerged from a coalition of leftist political parties and currents that counted amongst their members committed campaigners for human rights in carceral sites and beyond, but also, more generally, people