"It's 17 degrees and sunny, it's absolutely beautiful, we've had a couple of really good pork chops, some fantastic salads and two carafes of wine – why aren't we all living in Greece? Who cares who the government is?"

Then, Mr Geronimos somehow manages to switch from optimism to pessimism in a way that is truly startling – and very Greek. "You talk to people about the election here (on Sunday) and say 'what's going to happen' and they say 'who cares'," he says.

"The people who are stealing money from us will change, or not. If they change, then other people will keep stealing money from us. All we want to do is get on with our lives."

Mr Geronimos, a Perth-born businessman who runs a bar and hostel in Athens, clearly doesn't want to talk down the place too much. He makes money from tourism, after all. But even on a sunny afternoon, after good wine and a better meal, it's hard to be a Pollyanna in Greece.

Greece's economic charts all fell off a cliff in 2009. In a few years the unemployment rate went from 8 per cent to 27 per cent. Despite stern austerity measures public debt has continued to climb, and the economy is still shrinking (though less quickly than a few years ago).

But the Greeks are sick of pay cuts (with no change to the cost of living – and supermarkets that are for some reason more expensive than London's), shuttered businesses, soup kitchen queues and new taxes as the government slowly tackles their €320 billion ($456.8 billion) of national debt.

They are sick enough for many of them to believe in an alternative. Enter Alexis Tsipras, charismatic, positive, the 40-year old leader of Syriza - the Coalition of the Radical Left - a former member of the Communist Youth of Greece who named his second son after Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"Syriza is not an ogre or a big threat to Europe, but the voice of reason," Mr Tsipras wrote this month. "It's the alarm clock which will lift Europe from its lethargy and sleepwalking."

His party wants to renegotiate Greece's debt to the European Union and International Monetary Fund, to get "repayment conditions which don't lead towards a country suffocating in recession and do not drive people to despair and poverty".

It's a promise that infuriates the current government. Deputy Prime Minister Evangelos Venizelos took a swipe at both Mr Tsipras' age and his policies by dubbing him Harry Potter, for promising "a return to prosperity in some sort of magical way".

"Their trump card seems to be that they have never been in government and so they can argue that they are not responsible for the crisis," Mr Venizelos told Italy's La Stampa newspaper.

It appears almost certain that Syriza will get the most votes in the election – polls this week gave it a comfortable lead of 4 to 6 per cent over Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' New Democracy Party. Perhaps with this in mind, recently Mr Tsipras has been hedging his bets, writing in London's Financial Times this week that "a Syriza government will respect Greece's obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets".

Anyway, Greece has chosen the wrong time to threaten Europe. The current presidency of the European Council is held by Latvia – a country which suffered a 25 per cent contraction after the financial crisis, submitted to harsh reforms imposed by the IMF and European Central Bank (some salaries crashed by a half), then emerged as one of Europe's strongest-growing economies. Naturally, they're fans of discipline, and currently in an unusually strong position of influence in the EU.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned this week that a default or a restructuring of Greece's debt would have "consequences" for confidence in the country – suggesting that it would make it harder for Athens to borrow money in the future.

Greek journalist Isaac Karipidis says his compatriots are realists – they know that half of what Syriza is promising is impossible. "But I think even if they do 40 per cent of what they promised, people will be happy," he said. "People are really suffering. I know children who go to school without breakfast."

Hovering over the argument is the perennial fear of a "Grexit" -  the country leaving the euro. It's a prospect that causes economists to shudder, for the fracture that would open up in the European project and for the financial chaos it would cause in Greece.

That's why no one is seriously proposing it – not even Syriza. "No one in Greece besides the total idiot  one per cent want to be outside Europe," Mr Geronimos says. "Everyone understands the danger of leaving the euro, even the hard-nut Communists. Publicly they say we are going to leave the euro, privately they know we can't."

Many – including Mr Geronimos – say the country's core problem is not austerity or productivity. It's public corruption. The black economy is up to a quarter of GDP. Customs and tax officials take bribes, doctors accept cash to bump patients up national health service waiting lists. Fakelaki ("little envelopes") are handed over for everything from driving licences to building permits.

"Greeks want to put an end to the rule and regime of deterioration, corruption, lying, blackmailing and fear," Mr Tsipras said at a rally last year.

They certainly want to. How much they really expect Syriza to achieve - and how much it actually can - are harder questions.