After exit polls showed left-wing coalition Syriza handily winning Greece's parliamentary election on Sunday, a senior minister with the country's ruling center-right party publicly admitted defeat, the Associated Press reports.

"We lost," said Health Minister and New Democracy spokesperson Makis Voridis. "The extent of that result is not yet clear."

According to the BBC, exit polls showed Syriza winning between 36 and 38 percent of the vote compared to New Democracy's 26 to 28 percent, a projection that would give the leftists 150 of the 300 seats in Greece's parliament. The official results will be finalized on Monday.

Before the election, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras promised to renegotiate with Greece's creditors to end the country's unpopular austerity policies, measures imposed as a condition of billions of dollars of bailout loans following the European debt crisis.

"Democracy will return to Greece," Tsipras told reporters while casting his ballot on Sunday. "The message is that our common future in Europe is not the future of austerity."

[Image via AP Images]