SYRIZA'S BREAKTHROUGH victory in the Greek general election is something of a game-changer for the European Union as a whole - or, at least, that's what it will be hoping.
Alexis Tsipras will certainly bring a new perspective to the quarterly summits of EU leaders. While the European Council of 28 leaders is by no means a politically homogenous group, there is a certain degree of 'mainstreamism' among all leaders.
Tsipras is a proverbial cat among the pigeons. He is young (40), and while not a total political newcomer, his appointment as Syriza leader six years ago - aged just 33 - made him the youngest party leader in modern Greek history.
His mandate today comes on the crest of a wave. Greece famously needed two general elections to produce a government in 2012 (the joke was that, as the investors of democracy, Greeks loved it so much they voted twice.)
Tsipras led Syriza into the first of those polls with only 13 of the parliament's 300 seats. First time around he took it to over 50 - and then, buoyed by a public anger at the failure of 'mainstream' leaders to strike a deal, took it to over 70 a month later.
This time he's taken it to 150 - and to the point where his party is within a hair's breadth of being able to govern without the help of any coalition partners at all. (If help is needed, he is likely to partner with his comrades in the Communist Party, or with the 'Independent Greeks', who are right-wing but share Syriza's outlook on Europe).
That means the European Union will need to deal very carefully with Tsipras's demands - particularly on European matters, and the domestically explosive issue of Greece's bailout. And that, in turn, will have huge questions to pose for Ireland and Enda Kenny.
The timing is particularly delicate. With a year to go until the election, Fine Gael and Labour have been making a virtue of pointing to their economic performance. In recent months, thanks in part to the ECB, this has manifested in a falling cost of borrowing for the Irish government - which could come down even more now that the ECB could be buying tens of billions of our debt from the second-hand markets.
But Tsipras's demands for a debt write-down are a serious threat to that stability. If Tsipras gets his way, there will be an inherent doubt about whether other peripheral European countries and their prospect of paying their loans. That, in turn, will mean another wage of insecurity and, for the first time in years, a legitimate fear about the prospect of the dreaded C-word: "contagion".
The question then for Ireland will be whether it looks to get a similar deal - a prospect Enda Kenny has ruled out only within the last couple of days. (One suspects this could be revisited if an offer were tabled on a retrospective banking deal.)
On the other hand, if Tsipras doesn't get his way, he's likely to face a domestic demand to pull out of the single currency, a prospect for which there is no legally-established method - the euro simply isn't designed to have members pulling out.
And that in turn has broader questions for the entirety of the Eurozone. The single most important thing achieved by European leaders in the last couple of years was to stop a more 'establishment' Greek government from leaving the currency and raising question marks about whether the floodgates could be sealed behind them. The same tactics might not work when the Greek people have now spoken so emphatically for a movement which is promising to shred the rule book and start all over again.
Whichever outcome we see, Tsipras and Syriza are definitively raising the stakes in Europe. The question now for Enda Kenny is whether he will try to maintain the previous stability throughout the Eurozone, or whether he will look to piggyback on any concessions Tsipras can win.
