Andreas Papandreou

Prime minister of Greece (1981-1989, 1993-1996)

• Born: February 5, 1919
• Birthplace: Chios, Greece
• Died: June 23, 1996
• Place of death: Ekáli, near Athens, Greece

Papandreou, the founder of the Panhellenic Socialist Party and two-time prime minister of Greece, was the dominant political figure in the country during the last two decades of the twentieth century. He was key to the return of Greek democracy after the military dictatorship of 1967-1974.

Early Life

Politician Andreas Papandreou (ahn-DRAY-ehs pah-pahn-DRAY-ew) was born on the Greek island of Chios in the eastern Aegean Sea. He was the son of George Papandreou , who was also prime minister of Greece (1944-1945, 1963, 1963-1965), and of Sofia Mineyko, whose ancestry was part Polish. George was a prominent supporter of the Liberal antimonarchist statesman Eleuthérios Venizélos, and he served his governments in various capacities, including as minister of the interior and minister of education, between 1924 and 1935. In 1935 he set up his own party, the Democratic Socialist Party of Greece, but during the following year, military dictator Ioannis Metaxas assumed power.

The young Papandreou was involved in radical politics as a student in Athens, where he attended the American College. In 1937 he matriculated at the University of Athens as a student of law. In 1939 he was arrested as a member of a Trotskyist group, and allegedly was tortured. Through the intercession of his father, he was released and permitted to leave Greece for the United States, where he spent the next twenty years. In 1942 he enrolled at Harvard University and received a Ph.D. in economics the next year. He volunteered for war duty as a nurse at Bethesda Naval Hospital and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1946 he accepted an academic appointment at Harvard and taught later at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley (where he served as chair of the Department of Economics), the University of Stockholm, and York University in Toronto.

In 1951, Papandreou married an American, Margaret Chant, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. He had another daughter from his time living in Sweden. His first son, Giorgos, born in 1952, became the eventual leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a political party founded by his father in 1974.

Papandreou returned to Greece in 1959 to head a research development program. In 1960 he became the program’s board chair, general director of the Athens Economic Research Center, and adviser to the Central Bank of Greece. Entering political life on his own, he was elected to Parliament in February, 1964, and was at once appointed minister to the first ministry of state, effectively deputy prime minister, in his father’s left-of-center Center Union government.

Life’s Work

Papandreou’s politics had remained to the left of those of his father, and his influence in his father’s government was considered suspect by many. He renounced his U.S. citizenship (Greeks may hold dual citizenship) in 1964 and became an outspoken critic of American influence in Greece. His attempts to purge the army of right-wing and monarchist elements and to rein in the power of the Greek Central Intelligence Service (now the National Intelligence Service) along with his opposition to the rightist leader George Grivas in Cyprus, earned him powerful enemies and helped to destabilize his father’s government. George effectively demoted his son in June, 1964, by moving him to the less sensitive post of deputy minister of coordination. In November, the younger Papandreou resigned from his government position, only to return a few months later.

Almost immediately Papandreou was embroiled in the Aspida affair, an alleged leftist conspiracy within the armed forces. His father had attempted to take over the defense portfolio, leading to his dismissal from office by King Constantine II (b. 1940) on July 15, which precipitated a two-year constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed with an April 21, 1967, military coup led by a junior officer, Colonel George Papadopoulos, on the eve of an election that almost certainly would have returned George Papandreou to power.

Along with other prominent political figures, both father and son were arrested during the coup. George was soon released on grounds of age and health. The younger Papandreou, however, was imprisoned for eight months without trial. Released on December 24, he took up exile in Paris. George died in November, 1968. His public funeral drew an estimated 100,000 mourners and was interpreted widely as a protest against the military dictatorship, or junta.

During the seven years of the junta, Papandreou had toured around the world to denounce the Greek military government as a tool of American interests. In July, 1974, the junta collapsed. Following Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus, Papandreou returned to Greece with other exile leaders, including Constantine Karamanlis, a veteran statesman and leader of the right-of-center New Democracy Party, who became prime minister of the restored democracy. Papandreou and cadres formed their own party PASOK. An uneasy period of transition began.

Colonel Papadopoulos and his colleagues were put on trial, but the United States, which had military bases in Greece and closely watched Greek political developments, regarded Papandreou with intense concern. No left-of-center political party had led Greece for decades, and the wounds of the Greek civil war still ran deep. PASOK received only 13.6 percent of the vote in the 1974 elections, but it increased its share to 25.3 percent in 1977, making Papandreou the leader of the opposition.

The election that returned PASOK to power in October, 1981, with 48.1 percent of the vote to New Democracy’s 35.9 percent, was a watershed event in Greek politics. The victory was a triumph of electoral organization. PASOK cadres had reached into virtually every social modality trade and student unions, agricultural cooperatives, professional associations, and women’s groups achieving both local and national dominance. The key to success, however, was Papandreou’s own personal energy, charisma, and attention to detail. He harnessed as well the popularity of his father, a symbol of resistance to the junta, and the Greek tradition of legacy politics, in which “first families” handed down political power from generation to generation.

Ideologically, PASOK offered itself as a classic socialist party, with its rhetorical emphasis on class struggle, mass empowerment, and social justice. There was emphasis, too, on environmentalism and women’s rights, movements widely espoused by progressive circles in the 1970’s. Papandreou remained highly critical of American influence in Greece, promised the removal of American bases, and pointedly cited Turkey rather than Communist Eastern Europe as the country’s greatest security threat. However, a careful observer of the Greek scene in the late 1970’s would have observed a growing if unacknowledged convergence between the two major political parties, which after 1981 were to dominate electoral politics and alternate in power. Karamanlis had legalized the Communist Party, which proved to have little appeal at the polls.

As the country began to modernize and prosper, at least in relative terms, integration within the European Union (EU), now Greece’s largest trading partner, became the overarching goal of successive governments. Since coordination with the EU could be represented on the left as a “defiance” of American domination, the acceptance of capitalist norms could be suitably elided. As its own moment in the sun approached, PASOK spoke of social “change” rather than socialism, and of privileged and nonprivileged sectors of society rather than class conflict. Most of the ministries in the new PASOK government would be held by veterans of George Papandreou’s Center Union Party. Having begun by distancing himself from the essentials of his father’s politics, Papandreou was now prepared to embrace them.

The eight years that spanned the first Papandreou administration (1981-1989), therefore, saw a pattern not unfamiliar elsewhere on the continent: an initial package of moderate welfare and populist-centered reforms (a national health service, subsidized public utilities, civil marriage and divorce); a period of austerity enforced by EU central bankers when deficit spending exceeded the limits they imposed; and, to contain the resulting disenchantment, an increasingly bloated and corrupt patronage system that served as a reward for party faithful and a temporary catchment for popular discontent. Moreover, many fundamental reforms, including increased business taxes, worker safety laws, and a reduction in the work week, had already been achieved under Karamanlis. Ignoring party labels, the period from 1975 to 1985 thus saw a more or less continuous pattern of reform within the context of a modernizing economy.

If Papandreou continued to dominate Greek politics, it was more through the force of his personality and by ritual displays of anti-Americanism and “solidarity” with developing world politics than by any further novelty in his program or special competence in governing. The American bases were duly removed, but the collapse of communism left a unipolar world in which the nominally left-leaning leader of a small country its strategic value sharply devalued by the end of the Cold War no longer had much cachet on the world stage.

Papandreou was elected to a second term in 1985 with 45.8 percent of the vote and a loss of eleven parliamentary seats, still a comfortable enough majority. Unpopular fiscal retrenchment followed, and then scandal. A Greek banker and media magnate, George Koskotas, was convicted of bilking the Bank of Crete of some $200 million with the collusion of government ministers. Further scandals involved airplane purchases and grain exports. Six of Papandreou’s ministers resigned in protest, and the June, 1989, elections returned a New Democracy-led coalition government.

Again in opposition, Papandreou was dogged by the Bank of Crete scandal, which led to his indictment for ordering state corporations to transfer their assets to the bank. A special court acquitted him of wrongdoing by a vote of 7-6 but left his reputation permanently tainted, as did his divorce from his wife Margaret and his subsequent marriage to Dimitra Liani, a flight attendant less than half his age. However, New Democracy proved unpopular, as continuing austerity led to a serious decline in real income. In October, 1993, a now-ailing Papandreou confounded expectation by winning a third term with 46.9 percent of the vote. No longer the party of economic populism, let alone socialism, PASOK now presented itself as the more effective steward of retrenchment. Papandreou was soon little more than a figurehead, however.

On November 20, 1995, Papandreou was hospitalized with advanced heart disease and kidney failure, and on January 16, 1996, he retired from office in favor of a colorless PASOK technocrat, Costas Simitis. Papandreou’s death on June 23 was marked by an emotional public funeral recalling that of his father.

Significance

Papandreou was a critical actor in the central dramas of late twentieth century Greece: the loss and recovery of its democracy and the belated reconciliation that finally healed the wounds of its earlier civil war. Presenting himself first as a socialist, then as a populist and, finally, as the prudent manager of Greece’s bid for EU membership, he seemed to his contemporaries a larger-than-life figure even as the actual dimensions of his political role dwindled. The party he founded, led by his son, remains a fixture of Greek politics.

Bibliography

Clogg, Richard, ed. Greece, 1981-89: The Populist Decade. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Essays on the domestic and foreign policies of the first two Papandreou administrations, mostly by Greek scholars.

Close, David H. Greece Since 1945: Politics, Economy, and Society. New York: Longman, 2002. A cogent overview of postwar Greece, with balanced attention to all elements of analysis.

Kaloudis, George S. Modern Greek Democracy: The End of a Long Journey? Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Includes a chapter on Greece under the dictatorship of 1967-1974.

Papandreou, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Papandreou’s own memoir of his involvement in the politics of the 1960’s, and of the ensuing military coup.

Stavrou, Nikolaos A., ed. Greece Under Socialism: A NATO Ally Adrift. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Orpheus, 1988. A critical view of Papandreou’s governance of Greece in the 1980’s.

Woodhouse, C. M. The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels. New York: Franklin Watts, 1985. A lucid account of the origins, course, and aftermath of the Greek military dictatorship, with careful attention to the role of both Papandreous.