Alexandros Papanastasiou

Alexandros Papanastasiou (1932)

Alexandros Papanastasiou ( Greek Ἀλέξανδρος Παπαναστασίου , born July 8, 1876 in Tripoli ( Arcadia ); † November 17, 1936 ) was a Greek politician and twice prime minister of his country.

Family and studies

The son of MP Panagiotis Papanastasiou spent his childhood in Kalamata and Piraeus and initially studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , which he completed in 1899 with a doctorate in law. After being admitted to the bar in 1901, he completed studies in social sciences , law and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin , which was then called Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, and the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, and from 1905 until his return to Greece in 1907 at universities in London and Paris .

Political career

Member of Parliament and World War I

He began his political career in 1910 with the first election as a member of the National Assembly (Voulí ton Ellínon) . In this function he campaigned in particular for an agrarian reform in Thessaly , which should dissolve the large farms that have existed since the Ottoman Empire in favor of local small farmers. In 1916 he joined the National Defense Movement of Eleftherios Venizelos , under which Greece soon took part in the First World War on the side of the Allied powers of the Entente ( Great Britain , France and Russia ) . In the same year he was appointed governor of the Ionian Islands .

Minister and time of the Greco-Turkish War

After the end of the First World War, he was temporarily minister of transport and public health in the third cabinet of Venizelos (June 1917 to November 1920). After the defeat in the parliamentary elections of November 1920, in which the Komma Fileleftheron (KF) of Venizelos received 50.2 percent of the vote due to the electoral system, but only 118 of the 369 parliamentary seats, Papanastasiou remained unlike Venizelos in Greece. In the following years he criticized the governments of the People's Party (Inoméni Antipolítevsis) of Dimitrios Rallis , Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos , Dimitrios Gounaris , Nikolaos Stratos and Petros Protopapadakis for their misconduct in the Greco-Turkish War from 1919 to 1922 . Together with others, he then published a “Democratic Manifesto” in which he massively attacked the monarchy . He was then arrested along with the other signatories.

Prime Ministerial 1924

After the end of the Greco-Turkish War, which from the perspective of the Greeks represented a catastrophe in Asia Minor , the government of the People's Party (IA) collapsed. Papanastasiou then became Prime Minister for the first time on March 12, 1924. After the proclamation of a republican state on March 25, 1924, King George II went into exile in Romania . On April 13, 1924, voters then voted in a referendum for the abolition of the monarchy. During his tenure, which lasted only until June 24, 1924, several significant reforms in education were initiated, such as the laying of the foundation stone of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , the introduction of the modern Greek language and the establishment of educational institutions for adults. In his cabinet he was also foreign and finance minister at times.

In the government of Alexandros Zaimis , he was Minister of Agriculture from 1926 to 1928. In this role he was instrumental in founding the Agricultural Bank of Greece.

Prime Ministerial 1932

From May 26 to June 5, 1932 he was again Prime Minister of a transitional government. In this cabinet he was foreign minister and minister of war at the same time.

Although he subsequently withdrew from active politics, he was placed under house arrest by General Ioannis Metaxas on April 13, 1936 after the beginning of the dictatorship , in which he died of a heart attack seven months later.

literature

• Georg Veloudis: Papanastasiu, Alexandros , in: Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . Vol. 3. Munich 1979, pp. 391-393

Web links

• List of ministers of governments 1899–1924 ( Memento from May 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• List of ministers of governments 1924–1946 ( Memento of December 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Election results 1926–1936 ( Memento from February 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

predecessor	Office	successor
Georgios Kaphantaris	Prime Minister of Greece 1924	Themistoklis Sofoulis

predecessor	Office	successor
Eleftherios Venizelos	Prime Minister of Greece 1932	Eleftherios Venizelos