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PARIS — As a caustic election campaign in Greece revives fears that the country could leave the euro, European officials are taking an increasingly hard line toward Athens, saying they want to keep Greece in the single currency, though not at any cost.
The admonishments have stacked up in recent days — from Berlin, Paris and Brussels — intensifying what is shaping up to be another high-stakes standoff between Europe’s leaders and the eurozone’s most-troubled country.
European leaders have spent their time since the last acute Greek political crisis, in 2012, building firewalls against the kind of financial contagion that rocked the Continent before, and their stiff warnings to some extent reflect their confidence that the eurozone would survive a Greek exit.
But the turmoil in Greece is already demonstrating its potential to rattle financial markets, adding an untimely sprinkling of anxiety to a heaping of external factors that helped drive the euro to a nine-year low against the dollar on Monday.
To the evident dismay of European officials, and international markets, the narrow front-runner for the Jan. 25 election appears to be Alexis Tsipras, the head of the leftist Syriza party.
Though Mr. Tsipras has made it clear that he would like to keep Greece in the eurozone, he has also vowed to repudiate parts of the nation’s debt, roll back the austerity measures required by Greece’s international creditors, and renegotiate deals with them that have given Greece access to billions in aid.
Following through on such pledges could cost Greece’s creditors, and European taxpayers, tens of billions of dollars, particularly if financial markets become strained by uncertainty.
The possibilities are once again raising an existential question for European leaders: What cost are they willing to bear to keep Greece in the eurozone? Their answer, for now, has amounted to a tough line, particularly from the austerity-minded Germans.
On Monday, Germany’s economics minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said Europe would not accept undermining the stability that has returned to the eurozone in the last couple of years.
“We aren’t vulnerable to blackmail,” he said in an interview with the German newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine. “We expect from the Greek government — regardless of who will form it — that the agreements made with the E.U. will be respected.”
Last week, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, cautioned Greece against moving away from its current economic reforms, saying: “If Greece takes another path, it will be difficult. Any new government will have to stick to the agreements made by its predecessor.”
In an acknowledgment of the delicacy of the situation, German officials on Monday quickly backed away from a weekend report by the magazine Der Spiegel that suggested that Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mr. Schäuble believed that the eurozone could cope if Greece quit the euro and returned to the drachma.
A government spokesman denied that contingency plans had been made for such a possibility, and insisted that Germany wanted Greece to remain in the eurozone.
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Officials in Brussels, too, emphasized Monday that membership in the euro bloc was “irrevocable,” although they left open to what extent Greece could renegotiate the terms of its bailout after the election.
“The euro is here to stay,” said a European Commission spokeswoman, Annika Breidthardt.
Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who leads the Liberal group in the European Parliament, called the idea of a Greek exit, or “Grexit,” from the eurozone “nonsense,” not only because most Greeks do not want to leave the euro, but also because European taxpayers would wind up losing billions of euros that Greece owes them.
“Instead of talking about a possible Grexit, we should focus on solving the investment problem Greece and other countries are facing,” Mr. Verhofstadt said.
And in Paris, President François Hollande said in a French radio interview Monday that though the Greeks were “free to choose their own destiny,” there were “certain engagements that have been made and all those must be of course respected.”
Mr. Tsipras, for his part, has softened the fiery language he employed during national elections in 2012, when he threatened to rip up Greece’s bailout agreement and default on the debt, and insists that he does not want Greece to leave the eurozone.
But in a campaign swing this weekend, he said his party would ensure that much of Greece’s debt was written off as part of a renegotiation of its international bailout deal, and reiterated plans to roll back many of the austerity policies required for the bailout.
“Austerity is both irrational and destructive,” he said. “To pay back debt, a bold restructuring is needed.”
On Monday, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, whom many Greeks blame for carrying out a harsh austerity plan that has deepened a recession, kicked off his re-election campaign with a stark warning that a victory for Mr. Tsipras would lead Greece to default and an exit from the euro.
Mr. Tsipras has brushed off such arguments as a scare tactic. But most European governments would still prefer to deal with Mr. Samaras, who has overseen the slow but steady accomplishment of many reforms required by Greece’s creditors, at the political cost of angering many Greeks who see austerity as having devastated their lives.
Mr. Samaras also improved Greece’s overall financial figures enough so that it could return to borrowing in international financial markets last year, for the first time since 2012.
Mr. Samaras’s term was supposed to end in 2016, and he had forecast a return to meager economic growth this year after a devastating five-year recession that has left unemployment at a staggering 25 percent. But Mr. Samaras has insisted that if the early election empowers Syriza, the gains that Greece has made will fall by the wayside.
Already, Greek businesses have reported that foreign investments have all but stopped amid the uncertainty, while billions of euros in value has been wiped off the Athens stock exchange in the last several weeks.
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Mr. Tsipras continues to run about three percentage points ahead of Mr. Samaras in national political polls, but it is not entirely certain that Syriza will garner enough seats in the Greek Parliament to have a solid majority. If that happens, Mr. Tsipras will be forced to form a fragile coalition government, raising questions about his ability to carry through on his election promises.
Nearly 20 percent of Greek voters say they have not yet decided whom to vote for on Jan. 25, according to an analysis by economists at Commerzbank. Adding to the uncertainty, a former Greek prime minister, George A. Papandreou, on Monday formed a new political party that could cost Syriza some votes.
Still, most observers expect a Greece run by Mr. Tsipras would stay within the eurozone, and that a new Greek government would reach an agreement with its European creditors following a period of turmoil. After all, if Greece were to return to the drachma, the country would likely face new economic upheaval that it could ill afford.
Preventing a Greek exit is also still desirable for Germany and other countries, since billions of euros in European taxpayer money could be wiped out if Greece were to leave the euro, raising the risk of a political backlash against leaders in those countries, said Jörg Krämer and Christoph Weil, the Commerzbank economists.
“It would be much easier politically to renegotiate a compromise with Greece, albeit a lame one, and thus maintain the fiction that Greece will pay back its loans at some point in time,” they said.
