Greece’s new Cabinet was sworn in yesterday, bringing in few new faces as re-elected Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras sought continuity in pushing through economic reforms under the watchful eye of international lenders.

Newly-appointed Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos looks on during the swearing-in ceremony yesterday.

Tsipras appointed two bailout negotiators to head his economic team, reappointing Euclid Tsakalotos as Finance Minister and making George Chouliarakis deputy finance minister. Tsakalotos, a low-key Oxford University-trained Marxist economist, was at the finance helm when Greece and its creditors produced an €86 billion loan accord in August. Chouliarakis, who was finance minister in the caretaker government during the recent election campaign, was a senior member of the bailout negotiation team, known for his grasp of details. Both need to steer through reforms ranging from changes to the pension and labour systems, to overseeing the recapitalisation of banks and discussion of debt relief for the country.

Tsipras appointed Yiannis Mouzalas, an active member of the Doctors of the World charity, as Minister for Migration within the Interior Ministry. Mouzalas, who held the post in the caretaker government, has taken part in relief missions to trouble spots like Kobane in Syria. Other reappointments included Nicos Kotzias as foreign minister, Panos Skourletis as energy ministry and Panos Kammenos as defence minister.

Kotzias, once a member of Greece’s Communist youth, has in the past portrayed the country as a victim of foreign interests.

Kammenos is leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks, the junior party in Tsipras’s coalition.

Skourletis has been criticised for suspending the permit for a disputed Canadian-run gold mine project in northern Greece in August.

The latest Greek government has to ensure the bailout does not go off track

Tsipras’ re-election on Sunday made his party the dominant force in Greece. His harshest hard-left rebel critics failed to make it into Parliament but he has entrenched his position as Greece’s dominant political figure and has teamed up with the right-wing Independent Greeks party, his partners in a previous administration from January to August, giving the government a slim majority of 155 seats in the 300-member Parliament.

New Democracy, which polled 28 per cent in the election and came second, dismissed the Cabinet line up as a ‘recycling of old faces in the same ministries’.

“We hope that the second Syriza-Independent Greeks government overcomes the inadequacy of the first one,” it said in a statement.

The government’s two main tasks will be to ensure that the bailout given by the eurozone in exchange for deep economic reforms does not go off track, and to handle Greece’s huge refugee problem.

Of the record 430,000 refugees and migrants who have made the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, 309,000 have arrived via Greece. Many of Greece’s partners, particularly in eastern Europe, want Athens to stop allowing the refugees to pass north on a trek to Germany and other wealthy northern countries.

But it is the implementation of the bailout, which was agreed after months of bitter negotiations in which Tsipras railed against austerity being imposed on Greece, that will be the government’s overwhelming task.