Mitsotakis, Konstantinos

Konstantinos Mitsotakis comes from a family with a long tradition in politics. He studied law, political and economic science at the University of Athens, and he is the father of Dora Bakogiannis (presently minister of foreign affairs) and Kyriakos Mitsotakis (MP [member of Parliament] of the ruling party). During the German occupation, he assumed a leading role in the anti-Nazi Resistance on the island of Crete, and he [Page 465]was imprisoned and sentenced to death twice by the Germans. In 1986, he was honored by the British Parliament for his activity.

Mitsotakis was elected as MP for the first time at the age of 28, first took governmental responsibilities at the age of 32, and ever since he had been incessantly elected with different parties until the coup d'état of April 1967.

He was arrested by the dictatorship along with other political leaders. In August 1967, he escaped to Paris, where he would remain in exile for the next 6 years. In the fall of 1973, he arrived in Greece and was again imprisoned by the dictatorial regime. He was released after the political changeover and was elected MP in 1977. In the spring of 1978, he entered Nea Democratia (New Democracy [N.D.]) and took ministerial positions.

In September 1984, he was elected president of the party of Nea Democratia, and in June's 1989 general elections, N.D., under his leadership, was elected first party with 44.3% of the vote, however without achieving absolute majority (145 seats out of 300). Under these circumstances a coalition government with the Left was the only solution. To make this move easier he accepted not becoming prime minister himself and proposed Tzannis Tzannetakis for the position. That government went down in history for referring his great political opponent, Andreas Papandreou, to a Special Court. Papandreou was indicted on charges of embezzlement of state funds but was cleared by the Special Court. Konstantinos Mitsotakis took the oath of the prime minister of Greece on April 1990 after the electoral victory of N.D. with 46.9% of the vote. During those elections, foreign communication experts were invited by N.D. (as well as by other political parties) to offer media training courses for television campaigning.

Mitsotakis's government, despite its marginal majority in Parliament (151 seats) and the massive reactions of the opposition as well as some disputes from within the party, was the first Greek government after World War II that took measures to downsize the state. But his government was overthrown on September 1993 on the initiative of the young hardliner minister of foreign affairs, Antonis Samaras, on the occasion of the “Macedonian Issue” and the privatization of the Greek Telecoms. Mitsotakis attributed his overthrow to vested economic interests, which he called “interweaving interests”—a term that still overruns Greek political discourse. After the untimely elections of October 1993 and N.D.'s electoral defeat, he resigned from the party leadership. Having achieved nearly half a century of parliamentary life, he decided not to be a candidate in the elections of March 2004. Today he continues to intervene in political life whenever he sees fit.

...