Kyriakos Mitsotakis He is the first president to be re-elected in Greece since the great economic crisis that plunged the country into financial chaos. Analysts agree that the key to the Conservative prime minister’s great victory, both in May and yesterday, is his positive speech during campaignsfocused on highlighting the economic achievements of his first legislature and the need to be re-elected to finish implementing the reforms begun in key sectors of the administration.
“He doesn’t have a real opponent right now. Something he’s dealt with over the last four years. It has been able to deconstruct Syriza, it has made the conservatives stronger and has stolen voters from PASOK. Mitsotakis is both capable of even dealing with great tragedies that have shocked the country such as the Tempe train accident and the migrant shipwreck. Even the people who were angry about Tempe and blamed the authorities did not vote for the opposition to punish the government: they either abstained or voted for small parties,” he analyzes. George Tzogopoulosresearcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.
Mitsotakis pertenece to one of the three dynasties that have exercised power in the Hellenic country since World War II: the conservative Karamanlis, the socialist Papandreou and the Mitsotakis-Venizelos, traditionally center-right.
Is son of Constantinos MitsotakisGreek ‘premier’ between 1990 and 1993 who was also the nephew of the historic Eleftherios Venizelosa key figure in the Cretan insurrection against the Ottoman Empire, the architect of the integration of the island into the Greek state in 1905 and seven times prime minister between 1910 and 1933. Decades later, the lineage continues hand in hand with Kyriakos, leader of New Democracy, and its sister Dora Bakoyannis (last name of her husband murdered by far-left terrorism), the first woman mayor of Athens during the 2004 Olympics and later foreign minister with the Government of Kostas Karamanlis.
With his victory in 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis returned Greece to the tutelage of the ‘old guard’ after the four-year ‘impasse’ of the radical left populism of Syriza that ousted New Democracy from power in 2015 with its promise to end with “the vicious circle of austerity” in a crisis-stricken Greece. At that time, Mitsotakis was part of that conservative Executive of Andonis Samaras as Minister of Administrative Reform, tasked with sacking thousands of civil servants as dictated by the draconian bailout conditions.