Greece's radical leftist opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras, accused prime minister Antonis Samaras yesterday of sowing fear in the country to win support for a vote to elect a new president which the government must win to avoid a snap election.

Tsipras's Syriza party, which wants to tear up Greece's European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout deal, is likely to win an election, opinion polls have suggested, but Samaras has warned that the country risked a "catastrophic" return to the depths of its debt crisis if his government fell.