Kyriakos Mitsotakis
Kyriakos Mitsotakis is a Greek politician, President of New Democracy and Leader of the Opposition since January 2016. He served as Minister of Administrative Reform and e-Governance from 2011 to 2015, he has been a Member of the Hellenic Parliament for the Athens B parliamentary constituency since 2004. Born in Athens, he is the son of the former Prime Minister of Greece and honorary president of New Democracy, Konstantinos Mitsotakis and his wife Marika. At the time of his birth his family had been placed under house arrest by the Greek military junta that had declared his father persona non grata and imprisoned him on the night of the coup; the family left Greece for Paris in 1968, when Kyriakos Mitsotakis was six months old, returned to Greece in 1974, when democracy was restored. On in his life Mitsotakis described the first six months of his life as political imprisonment. In 1986, he graduated from Athens College. From 1986 to 1990, he earned a bachelor's degree in social studies, he was a recipient of the Tocqueville prizes.
From 1992 to 1993 he attended Stanford University, earning an master's degree in International Relations. From 1993 to 1995, he attended Harvard Business School where he earned an MBA From 1990 to 1991 Kyriakos Mitsotakis worked as a financial analyst at the corporate finance division of Chase Bank in London. From 1991 to 1992, Mitsotakis returned to Greece and joined the Hellenic Air Force to fulfil his mandatory national service obligations. From 1995 to 1997, following the completion of his post-graduate studies, he was employed by the consultancy McKinsey & Company in London, focusing on the telecommunications and financial services industries. From 1997 to 1999 he worked for Alpha Ventures, a private equity subsidiary of Alpha Bank, as a senior investment officer, executing venture capital and private equity transactions. In 1999 he founded NBG Venture Capital, the private equity and venture capital subsidiary of the National Bank of Greece, acted as its CEO until April 2003, when he resigned to pursue a career in politics, managing its portfolio and executing transactions in Greece and the Balkans.
In January 2003 he was nominated by the World Economic Forum as a global leader of tomorrow. During the 2000 legislative election, Mitsotakis worked for New Democracy's national campaign. In the 2004 legislative election, Mitsotakis ran in the Athens B constituency, receiving more votes than any other New Democracy candidate in the country and was elected to the Hellenic Parliament. Mitsotakis is honorary president of Konstantinos K. Mitsotakis Foundation, aiming at promoting the life and works of Konstantinos Mitsotakis and at reporting the modern political history of Greece. In 24 June 2013, Mitsotakis was appointed as the Minister of Administrative Reform and e-Governance in Antonis Samaras' cabinet, succeeding Antonis Manitakis, he served in this position until January 2015. During this time, he pursued comprehensive national reforms by implementing a functional reorganization of institutions and processes, he steadfastly supported the drastic downsizing of the Public Sector and the structural reform of the tax administration.
In 2015, Mitsotakis served as a parliamentary representative for New Democracy, representing the President of the party in Parliament, as well as the body of the party's Representatives. He was charged with expressing the positions of his party during Parliamentary procedures and discourse, as well as ensuring the proper function of Parliament through a process of checks and balances. In March 2015, he claimed that then-Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis was undermining the Greek negotiations over the third bailout programme, saying: "Every time he opens his mouth, he creates a problem for the country’s negotiating position." Mitsotakis was the first of four New Democracy members to announce their candidacy in the leadership election, declared following the resignation of Antonis Samaras as party leader and the failure of New Democracy in the September 2015 snap election. Amongst the other contestants was then-interim leader and former Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament Vangelis Meimarakis.
According to the Financial Times, Mitsotakis was "billed as an outsider in the leadership race" due to the party establishment's support of Meimarakis' candidacy. Following the first round of voting with no clear winner, Mitsotakis came second, 11% behind Meimarakis. On 10 January 2016, Mitsotakis was elected president of the New Democracy political party succeeding Ioannis Plakiotakis with 4% difference from opponent Vangelis Meimarakis. A week following Mitsotakis' election as leader, two opinion polls were published that put New Democracy ahead of Syriza for the first time in a year. In his words he "is an ardent defender of a small and efficient state, education reform, the fight against red-tape and monopolistic practices that impede development and the fight against partisanship and cronyism in government". In 2007 it was reported that Mitsotakis was involved in the Siemens Greek bribery scandal, Mitsotakis has denied any involvement and no indication of guilt has so far been proven; the Siemens trial, in which Mitsotakis is not involved, is still pending.
Electronic office equipment, call centers, air conditioners etc. worth approx. €130,000 was received in the period preceding the 2007 elections by Mitsotakis from Siemens and two of its subsidiaries. The invoices indicate payment period of up to 60 days, however no part of the amount was paid until February 2008, when part of it was paid, just when the Siemens case was reopened by the courts, an amount of €43,850 was paid by check from Mr. Mitsotakis on Monday June 2. Earlier (on 2
Stefanos Stefanopoulos
Stefanos Stefanopoulos was a Greek politician, served as Prime Minister of Greece from 1965 to 1966. He was a moderate conservative, served as a cabinet member during Alexandros Papagos' government, he served as acting Prime Minister for a day after the latter's death on 4 October 1955. On 17 September 1965, he became Prime Minister of Greece during the period of the "Apostasia", supported by conservatives and defecting members of the Centre Union party. Unable to gain a parliamentary vote of confidence, his government fell on 22 December 1966
Athens
Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years and its earliest human presence starting somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennium BC. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state that emerged in conjunction with the seagoing development of the port of Piraeus, a distinct city prior to its 5th century BC incorporation with Athens. A center for the arts and philosophy, home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, it is referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent, in particular the Romans. In modern times, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, industrial, maritime and cultural life in Greece. In 2012, Athens was ranked the world's 39th richest city by purchasing power and the 67th most expensive in a UBS study. Athens is a global one of the biggest economic centres in southeastern Europe.
It has a large financial sector, its port Piraeus is both the largest passenger port in Europe, the second largest in the world. While at the same time being the sixth busiest passenger port in Europe; the Municipality of Athens had a population of 664,046 within its administrative limits, a land area of 38.96 km2. The urban area of Athens extends beyond its administrative municipal city limits, with a population of 3,090,508 over an area of 412 km2. According to Eurostat in 2011, the functional urban area of Athens was the 9th most populous FUA in the European Union, with a population of 3.8 million people. Athens is the southernmost capital on the European mainland; the heritage of the classical era is still evident in the city, represented by ancient monuments and works of art, the most famous of all being the Parthenon, considered a key landmark of early Western civilization. The city retains Roman and Byzantine monuments, as well as a smaller number of Ottoman monuments. Athens is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery.
Landmarks of the modern era, dating back to the establishment of Athens as the capital of the independent Greek state in 1834, include the Hellenic Parliament and the so-called "architectural trilogy of Athens", consisting of the National Library of Greece, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Academy of Athens. Athens is home to several museums and cultural institutions, such as the National Archeological Museum, featuring the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, the Acropolis Museum, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum and the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, 108 years it welcomed home the 2004 Summer Olympics, making it one of only a handful of cities to have hosted the Olympics more than once. In Ancient Greek, the name of the city was Ἀθῆναι a plural. In earlier Greek, such as Homeric Greek, the name had been current in the singular form though, as Ἀθήνη, it was rendered in the plural on, like those of Θῆβαι and Μυκῆναι.
The root of the word is not of Greek or Indo-European origin, is a remnant of the Pre-Greek substrate of Attica. In antiquity, it was debated whether Athens took its name from its patron goddess Athena or Athena took her name from the city. Modern scholars now agree that the goddess takes her name from the city, because the ending -ene is common in names of locations, but rare for personal names. During the medieval period, the name of the city was rendered once again in the singular as Ἀθήνα. However, after the establishment of the modern Greek state, due to the conservatism of the written language, Ἀθῆναι became again the official name of the city and remained so until the abandonment of Katharevousa in the 1970s, when Ἀθήνα, Athína, became the official name. According to the ancient Athenian founding myth, the goddess of wisdom, competed against Poseidon, the god of the seas, for patronage of the yet-unnamed city. According to the account given by Pseudo-Apollodorus, Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt water spring welled up.
In an alternative version of the myth from Vergil's Georgics, Poseidon instead gave the Athenians the first horse. In both versions, Athena offered the Athenians the first domesticated olive tree. Cecrops declared Athena the patron goddess of Athens. Different etymologies, now rejected, were proposed during the 19th century. Christian Lobeck proposed as the root of the name the word ἄθος or ἄνθος meaning "flower", to denote Athens as the "flowering city". Ludwig von Döderlein proposed the stem of the verb θάω, stem θη- to denote Athens as having fertile soil. In classical literature, the city was sometimes referred to as the City of the Violet Crown, first documented in Pindar's ἰοστέφανοι Ἀθᾶναι, or as τὸ κλεινὸν ἄστυ. In medieval texts, variant names include Setines and Astines, all derivations involving false splitting of p
Konstantinos Karamanlis
Konstantinos G. Karamanlis anglicised to Constantine Karamanlis or just Caramanlis, was a four-time Prime Minister and twice President of the Third Hellenic Republic, a towering figure of Greek politics whose political career spanned much of the latter half of the 20th century. Karamanlis was born in the village of Proti, part of the Ottoman Empire, he became a Greek citizen in 1913, after Macedonia was annexed by Greece and Serbia, in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War. His father was Georgios Karamanlis, a teacher who fought during the Greek Struggle for Macedonia, in 1904–1908. After spending his childhood in Macedonia, he went to Athens to attain his degree in law, he practised law in Serres, entered politics with the conservative People's Party and was elected Member of Parliament for the first time in the 1936 election at the age of 28. Health problems made him not participate in the Greco-Italian War. After World War II, Karamanlis rose through the ranks of Greek politics, his rise was supported by fellow party-member and close friend Lambros Eftaxias, who served as Minister for Agriculture under the premiership of Konstantinos Tsaldaris.
Karamanlis's first cabinet position was Minister for Labour in 1947 under the same administration. In 1951, along with most prominent members of the People's Party, Karamanlis joined the Greek Rally of Alexandros Papagos; when this party won power in 1951, Karamanlis became Minister of Public Works in the Papagos administration. He won the admiration of the US Embassy for the efficiency with which he built road infrastructure and administered American aid programs; when Papagos died after a brief illness, King Paul of Greece appointed the 48-year-old Karamanlis as Prime Minister. The King's appointment took the Greek political world by surprise, as it bypassed Stephanos Stephanopoulos and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, two senior Greek Rally politicians who were considered as the heavyweights most to succeed Papagos. After becoming Prime Minister, Karamanlis reorganized the Greek Rally as the National Radical Union. One of the first bills he promoted as Prime Minister implemented the extension of full voting rights to women, which stood dormant although nominally approved in 1952.
Karamanlis won three successive elections. In 1959 he announced a five-year plan for the Greek economy, emphasizing improvement of agricultural and industrial production, heavy investment on infrastructure and the promotion of tourism, setting the bases for the so-called Greek economic miracle. On the international front, Karamanlis abandoned the government's previous strategic goal for enosis in favour of independence for Cyprus. In 1958, his government engaged in negotiations with the United Kingdom and Turkey, which culminated in the Zurich Agreement as a basis for a deal on the independence of Cyprus. In 1959 the plan was ratified in London by the Cypriot leader Makarios III. Max Merten was Kriegsverwaltungsrat of the Nazi German occupation forces in Thessaloniki, he was convicted in Greece and sentenced to a 25-year term as a war criminal in 1959. On 3 November of that year, Merten benefited from an amnesty for war criminals, was set free and extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany, after political and economic pressure from West Germany.
Merten's arrest enraged Queen Frederica, a woman with German ties, who wondered whether "this is the way mister district attorney understands the development of German and Greek relations". In Germany, Merten was acquitted from all charges due to "lack of evidence." On 28 September 1960 German newspapers Hamburger Echo and Der Spiegel published excerpts of Merten's deposition to the German authorities where Merten claimed that Karamanlis, the Minister for the Interior Takos Makris and his wife Doxoula along with Deputy Minister of Defense George Themelis were informers during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Merten alleged that Karamanlis and Makris were rewarded for their services with a business in Thessaloniki which belonged to a Greek Jew sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, he alleged that he had pressured Karamanlis and Makris to grant amnesty and release him from prison. Karamanlis rejected the claims as unsubstantiated and absurd, accused Merten of attempting to extort money from him prior to making the statements.
The West German government decried the accusations as calumniatory and libelous. Karamanlis accused the opposition party of instigating a smear campaign against him. Although Karamanlis never pressed charges against Merten, charges were pressed in Greece against Der Spiegel by Takos and Doxoula Makris and Themelis, the magazine was found guilty of slander in 1963. Merten did not appear to testify during the Greek court proceedings; the Merten Affair remained at the centre of political discussions until early 1961. Merten's accusations against Karamanlis were never corroborated in a court of law. Historian Giannis Katris, an ardent critic of Karamanlis, has argued that Karamanlis should have resigned the premiership and pressed charges against Merten as a private individual in German courts, in order to clear his name. Nonetheless, Katris rejects the accusations as "unsubstantiated" and "obviously fallacious". Karamanlis as early as 1958 pursued an aggressive policy toward Greek membership in the EEC.
He considered Greece's entry into the EEC a personal dream because he saw it as the fulfillment of what he called "Greece's European Destiny". He person
Greek military junta of 1967–1974
The Greek military junta of 1967–1974 known as the Regime of the Colonels, or in Greece The Junta, The Dictatorship and The Seven Years, was a series of far-right military juntas that ruled Greece following the 1967 Greek coup d'état led by a group of colonels on 21 April 1967. The dictatorship ended on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus; the fall of the junta was followed by the Metapolitefsi, the establishment of the current Third Hellenic Republic. The 1967 coup and the following seven years of military rule were the culmination of 30 years of national division between the forces of the Left and the Right, that can be traced to the time of the resistance against Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. After the liberation in 1944, Greece descended into a civil war, fought between the communist forces and the now-returned government-in-exile. In 1944 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill determined to halt the Soviet encroachment in the Balkans, ordered British forces to intervene in the Greek Civil War in the wake of the retreating German military.
This was to be a open ended commitment. The United States stepped in to help. In 1947, the United States formulated the Truman Doctrine, began to support a series of authoritarian governments in Greece and Iran in order to ensure that these states did not fall under Soviet influence. With American and British aid, the civil war ended with the military defeat of the communists in 1949; the Communist Party of Greece and its ancillary organizations were outlawed, many Communists either fled the country or faced persecution. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Greek military began to work especially after Greece joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1952; this included notable CIA officers Gust Avrakotos and Clair George. Avrakotos maintained a close relationship with the colonels who would figure in the coup. Greece was a vital link in the NATO defense arc which extended from the eastern border of Iran to the northernmost point in Norway. Greece in particular was seen as being at risk.
In particular, the newly founded Hellenic National Intelligence Service and the Mountain Raiding Companies maintained a close liaison with their American counterparts. In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, they agreed to guard against a left-wing coup; the LOK in particular were integrated into the European stay-behind network. Although there have been persistent rumors about an active support of the coup by the U. S. government, there is no evidence to support such claims. The timing of the coup caught the CIA by surprise. After many years of conservative rule, the election of the Center Union's Georgios Papandreou, Sr. as Prime Minister was a sign of change. In a bid to gain more control over the country's government than his limited constitutional powers allowed, the young and inexperienced King Constantine II clashed with liberal reformers, dismissing Papandreou in 1965 and causing a constitutional crisis known as the "Apostasia of 1965". After making several attempts to form governments, relying on dissident Centre Union and conservative MPs, Constantine II appointed an interim government under Ioannis Paraskevopoulos, new elections were called for 28 May 1967.
There were many indications that Papandreou's Centre Union would emerge as the largest party, but would not be able to form a single-party government and would be forced into an alliance with the United Democratic Left, suspected by conservatives of being a proxy for the banned KKE. This possibility was used as a pretext for the coup. Greek historiography and journalists have hypothesized about a "Generals' Coup", a coup that would have been deployed at Constantine's behest under the pretext of combating communist subversion. Before the elections that were scheduled for 28 May 1967, with expectations of a wide Center Union victory, a number of conservative National Radical Union politicians feared that the policies of left-wing Centrists, including Andreas Papandreou, would lead to a constitutional crisis. One such politician, George Rallis, proposed that, in case of such an "anomaly", the King should declare martial law as the monarchist constitution permitted him. According to Rallis, Constantine was receptive to the idea.
According to U. S. diplomat John Day, Washington worried that Andreas Papandreou would have a powerful role in the next government, because of his father's old age. According to Robert Keely and John Owens, American diplomats present in Athens at the time, Constantine asked U. S. Ambassador William Phillips Talbot what the American attitude would be to an extra-parliamentary solution to the problem. To this the embassy responded negatively in principle – adding, that, "U. S. reaction to such move cannot be determined in advance but would depend on circumstances at the time." Constantine denies this. According to Talbot, Constantine met the army generals, who promised him that they would not take any action before the coming elections. However, the proclamations of Andreas Papandreou made them nervous, they resolved to re-examine their decision after seeing the results of the elections. In 1966, Constantine sent his envoy, Demetrios Bitsios, to Paris on a mission to persuade former prime minister Constantine Karamanlis to return to Greece and resume his prior role in politics.
According to uncorroborated claims made by the former monarch, Karaman
Cretan State
The Cretan State, was established in 1898, following the intervention by the Great Powers on the island of Crete. In 1897, an insurrection in Crete headed by the Ottoman Empire to declare war on Greece, which led Great Britain, France and Russia to intervene on the grounds that the Ottoman Empire could no longer maintain control, it was the prelude to the island's final annexation to the Kingdom of Greece, which occurred de facto in 1908 and de jure in 1913. The island of Crete, an Ottoman possession since the end of the Cretan War, was inhabited by a Greek-speaking population, whose majority was Christian. During and after the Greek War of Independence, the Christians of the island rebelled several times against external Ottoman rule, pursuing union with Greece; these were brutally subdued, but secured some concessions from the Ottoman government under the pressure of European public opinion. In 1878, the Pact of Halepa established the island as an autonomous state under Ottoman suzerainty, until the Ottomans reneged on that agreement in 1889.
The collapse of the Pact heightened tensions in the island, leading to another rebellion in 1895, which expanded in 1896–1897 to cover most of the island. Six Great Powers sent warships to Crete in February 1897, their naval forces combined to form an "International Squadron" charged with intervening to bring fighting on Crete to a halt. In Greece, nationalist secret societies and a fervently irredentist public opinion forced the Greek government to send military forces to the island. Although the International Squadron halted their activities, the presence of Greek forces on Crete provoked a war with the Ottoman Empire. Although most of Crete came under the control of Cretan insurgent and Greek forces, the unprepared Greek Army was crushed by the Ottomans, who occupied Thessaly; the war was ended by the intervention of the Great Powers, who forced the Greek contingent to withdraw from Crete and the Ottoman Army to stop its advance. In the Treaty of Constantinople the Ottoman Government promised to implement the provisions of the Halepa Pact.
In February 1897, the Great Powers decided to restore order by governing the island temporarily through an "Admirals Council" consisting of admirals from the six powers making up the International Squadron. Through naval bombardments of Cretan insurgent forces, by placing sailors and marines ashore to occupy key cities, by establishing a blockade of Crete and key ports in Greece, the International Squadron brought organized fighting on Crete to an end by the end of March 1897, although the insurrection continued. Soldiers from the armies of five of the powers arrived to occupy key Cretan cities in late March and April 1897. Thereafter, the Admirals Council focused on a negotiated settlement that would bring the insurrection to an end without bringing Ottoman governance of Crete to an end, but this proved impossible, they decided that Crete would become an autonomous state under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Germany opposed this idea and withdrew from Crete and the International Squadron in November 1897 and Austria-Hungary followed in March 1898, but the remaining four powers carried on with their plans.
On 6 September 1898, a Turkish mob massacred hundreds of Cretan Greeks and murdered the British Consul, his family, 17 British soldiers, in the city of Candia. As a result, the International Squadron and the occupying forces ashore expelled all Ottoman forces from Crete in November 1898; the autonomous Cretan State, under Ottoman suzerainty, garrisoned by an international military force, with its High Commissioner provided by Greece, was founded when Prince George of Greece and Denmark arrived to take office as the first High Commissioner detaching Crete from the Ottoman Empire, on 21 December 1898. The Admirals Council was dissolved on 26 December 1898; the National Bank of Greece established a bank, the Bank of Crete, which had a 40-year monopoly on note issuance. The Cretan State established a paramilitary force, the Cretan Gendarmerie, modeled on the Italian Carabinieri, to maintain public order; the Cretan Gendarmerie incorporated the four small gendarmerie units the four remaining occupying powers had created before the arrival of Prince George.
On 13 December 1898, George of Greece arrived as High Commissioner for a three-year tenure. On 27 April 1899, an Executive Committee was created, in which a young, Athens-trained lawyer from Chania, Eleftherios Venizelos, participated as Minister of Justice. By 1900, Venizelos and the Prince had developed differences over domestic policies, as well as the issue of Enosis, the union with Greece. Venizelos resigned in early 1901, for the next three years, he and his supporters waged a bitter political struggle with the Prince's faction, leading to a political and administrative deadlock on the island. In March 1905, Venizelos and his supporters gathered in the village of Therisos, in the hills near Chania, constituted a "Revolutionary Assembly", demanded political reforms and declared the "political union of Crete with Greece as a single free constitutional state" in a manifesto delivered to the consuls of the Great Powers; the Cretan Gendarmerie remained loyal to the Prince, but numer
Minister for Foreign Affairs (Greece)
The Minister for Foreign Affairs is the senior minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, established on 3 April 1833. The current Minister for Foreign Affairs, since 17 October 2018, is Alexis Tsipras, the current Prime Minister of Greece; the Minister has responsibility for the relations between foreign states. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Hellenic Aid
Australia: Companion of the Order of Australia (Honorary) (6 January 1992).[13]
