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Who is Mitsotakis, the head of a dynasty that doubled down on the right in Greece?

2023-05-26 17:37:56Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Who is Mitsotakis, the head of a dynasty that doubled down on the right in
Mitsotakis

When his son Konstantinos took a few seconds to get out of the voting booth in Kifissia, an Athens suburb where the Mitsotakis live and vote, his father Kyriakos laughed to photographers: "I hope there were no doubts."

Konstantin is a bespectacled boy, tall and thin like his father; named after his grandfather, former prime minister (1990-1993) and president of New Democracy, and former great-grandson of the father of the country, Eleftherio Venizelos, after whom the Athens airport is named.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the winner of the May 21 Greek elections, went to the polling station early in the morning with his whole family: his wife Mareva, their children Konstantinos, Sofia and Dafne. They spent the whole day together and on the fifth evening they were still at the party headquarters in Piraeus. Politics, for Kiriakos Mitsotakis, has been in the family since the first moments of his life.

He says he was born a "political prisoner", since when he came into the world on March 4, 1968, he was under house arrest, imposed by the clan of the military junta.

When he was six months old, his parents took him to Turkey, in an exile that would last six years. Then the colonels fell, but the Venizelos-Mitsotakis duo did not.

Of course, Kyriakos Mitsotakis is not the only Greek politician who belongs to a dynasty.

His former transport minister, who later resigned after the tragic train accident in Tempi on March 1, is the president's nephew, another of the three Kostas Karamanlis who have taken turns in the country's politics, similar in name as well. .

In March he resigned, apologizing for the infrastructure failures that led to the worst rail accident in Greek history (57 dead, 85 injured).

In the May elections, he ran again with New Democracy, and voters – in his constituency of Serre, in Central Macedonia – pardoned him too.

Then there are the Papandreu family; The Bakoyans – like 47-year-old Kostas, mayor of Athens, also from New Democracy – still linked to Mitsotakis.

But no one succeeds like Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on the eve of his second term (provided he wins an absolute majority on June 25), who presents himself as a "new man", almost an outsider, in the service of turning the country towards progress.

On Sunday, to celebrate in Piraeus, there was a line of taxis, blowing their horns and waving the Hellenic flag; restaurateurs and merchants, lawyers and accountants, that is, exponents of the large population of self-employed workers in a country whose economy still has large black pockets.

The fierce and indiscriminate attack in the final hours of the election campaign cost leftist rival Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party a 20 percent gap.

Since 2019, when Mitsotakis first became prime minister, Tsipras and his party have always been six percentage points below him in the polls.

But Sunday's vote swallowed another 14. How was this possible? "The real opponent of the left is not even Mitsotakis, but the left itself.

It still does not find an identity after years of crisis", explained the political commentator of the newspaper "Kathimerini", Dora Antoniou. The Socialist Party, Pasok, which did well after years in the "pit", has clearly gathered the votes of Syriza.

KKE communists also did well. "And then Syriza made some sensational mistakes." Almost unbelievable.

On Friday, a few hours after the electoral silence, the former minister of Tsipras, Theano Fotiou, said that "reforms must be paid for by the middle class".

That is, those who earn, and he repeated, "more than five thousand euros a year". The day before, the former minister George Katrougalos, had made a statement, "we will tax autonomy", which forced him to withdraw from the elections.

And apart from these jokes, the lack of a credible economic policy from Syriza, whose people still haven't forgiven the austerity measures of 2015, has cost a lot.

Not even tough migration policies – the construction and proposed expansion of a wall with Turkey to stop those coming from Central Asia; The video a few days ago showing Greek coastguards abandoning a dinghy full of women and children at sea – cost him dearly.

The radical economist, Yanis Varoufakis, whose party in the election remained under the threshold, spoke of an "organization" or an "Erdoganization" of the country, with the victory of Mitsotakis: a strong fist, fear for the rule of law, sovereignty and economic liberalism .

A recipe that the Greeks, returning from a black decade of special observations of the European economy, do not seem to be afraid of.

Mitsotakis presents himself above all as the man of growth and reforms that "to implement," he said in the speech where he ratified the election victory, "needs the full mandate of the voters."

Translated: with Sunday's vote, New Democracy wins 146 deputies. Five plus would be short of an absolute majority, and nothing would stand in the way of the old political tradition of the "cow market": one could, and always did, persuade a few newly elected MPs to go with the Conservatives.

Or he could attempt an unlikely alliance with the Socialists, whose phones were tapped by Mitsotakis's government until last summer in a scandal that cost him zero points in the polls.

But even this path remained only formal and Kiriakos Mitsotakis handed over the mandate to the hands of the President of the Republic.

Twenty-five days after the stalemate – June 25 – the president re-announced the election.

With the new electoral law, which reverts to the old, substantial majority premiums (up to 50 MPs), Mitsotakis will be prime minister virtually by acclamation and will be able to govern alone.


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