Andreas Papandreou

Andreas Papandreou 1968

Andreas Georgiou Papandreou ( Greek Ανδρέας Γεωργίου Παπανδρέου ; * February 5, 1919 in Chios ; † June 23, 1996 in Ekali ) was a Greek politician and economist. He was arrested and imprisoned during the Greek military coup in 1967. From October 21, 1981 to July 2, 1989 and from October 13, 1993 to January 22, 1996 he was Prime Minister of Greece . He is the father of the former Prime Minister Giorgos Andrea Papandreou and the son of Georgios Papandreou , who was also Prime Minister of Greece.

Early life and university career

Andreas Papandreou was born as the son of the leading Greek liberal politician and founder of the Democratic Center Party Georgios Papandreou and of Zofia Mineyko, daughter of the Polish engineer and Greek freedom fighter Zygmunt Mineyko . From 1937 he attended the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , where he studied law and economics and from 1938 became involved in Trotskyist groups. In the summer of 1939 he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by organs of the dictatorship established by Ioannis Metaxas in 1936 . However, due to international protests, he had to be released later and was able to leave the country in 1940.

Papandreou emigrated to the USA and continued his studies there at Columbia University and from 1942 at Harvard University , which he graduated with an MA in 1942 and a doctorate in economics in 1943 . At first he stayed at Harvard as a lecturer and associate professor. He acquired US citizenship in 1944 and served in the US Navy until 1945 . From then on he continued his teaching activities at Harvard University. He later received professorships at the University of Minnesota , Northwestern University , the University of California, Berkeley , where he was Dean of the School of Economics. He was also visiting professor at Stockholm University and York University in Toronto , Canada. After divorcing his first wife, Christina Rasia, he married the American Margaret Chant in 1951. Together they had three sons and a daughter. After the divorce from her (1988) he married the 36 years younger former stewardess of Olympic Airways Dimitra Liani in 1989 , to whom he remained married until his death in 1996.

Political career

Papandreou returned to the Kingdom of Greece in 1959 , where he directed an economic development research program . During this time he continued his teaching duties in the USA. In 1960 he became chairman of the board of directors and general manager of the Athens Economic Research Center and advisor to the Bank of Greece . In 1963, his father Georgios Papandreou was elected to head his Enosis Kendrou (Center Union) and Prime Minister of Greece. Andreas Papandreou became the chief economic advisor. He renounced his US citizenship on January 2, 1964 and was elected to the Greek Parliament as a member of the Central Union in the 1964 election. He was immediately appointed the first Minister of State (in fact, Deputy Prime Minister). When there were accusations of "neopotism" from opposition circles, he resigned from office in November of the same year. But in April 1965 he returned to the government as Minister for Economic Coordination.

During the Cold War , Papandreou took a rhetorical neutral position and called for Greece to be more independent from the USA . He criticized the massive presence of American military and intelligence teams and called for the replacement of senior officers with anti-democratic tendencies in the Greek military . He tried unsuccessfully to end the continued wiretapping of the cabinet by the Greek secret service KYP in extremely close cooperation with the CIA with covert wiretapping devices.

His rapid rise provoked resistance and was one of the reasons that led to the overthrow of the government of his father Georgios Papandreou: in 1965 Georgios Papandreou intended to fire the defense minister and take the post himself when the Aspida conspiracy was discovered within the army , the Andreas Papandreou should include and make implausible.

When the Greek colonels under Georgios Papadopoulos in April 1967 to power a coup , Andreas and George Papandreou were imprisoned. His father Georgios Papandreou died during house arrest in 1968, and Andreas was again deported. He spent seven years in exile in Sweden and Canada , where he founded an opposition movement, the All-Greek Liberation Movement (PAK), and traveled around the world to protest against the Greek military regime . Because of his good knowledge of the USA, he made the CIA responsible for the 1967 coup and increasingly took anti-American positions. During this time he held a visiting professorship in Stockholm from 1968 to 1969 and then in Toronto until 1974.

After the fall of the junta in 1974, Papandreou returned to Greece in July and founded the social democratic All-Greek Socialist Movement (PASOK). Most of his former companions of the PAK as well as members of other anti-dictatorial groups, such as the Democratic Defense ( Δημοκρατική Άμυνα ), joined the new party.

In the first elections after the end of the military dictatorship in November 1974, PASOK received only 13.5% of the votes against the candidate of the conservative Nea Dimokratia Konstantinos Karamanlis , but in 1977 it won 25%, making Papandreou the opposition leader.

After Karamanlis resigned in favor of his uncharismatic successor Georgios Rallis , PASOK was able to achieve a landslide victory over the New Democracy in the elections on October 18, 1981 . They were elected with 48% of the vote. Papandreou became Greece's first socialist prime minister and took over the Ministry of Defense at the same time. He called for a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Balkans and supported the Soviet proposal for an international Cyprus conference. In office, he had to abandon some of the promises he had made during the election campaign: Greece neither left NATO , nor did US troops have to withdraw from Greece, the polemical rhetoric against Turkey (especially with regard to its occupation Northern Cyprus), however, continued. After successful preparatory work by the conservatives, Greece joined the European Community (EC) in 1981 - during Papandreou's tenure - as the tenth member . In July 1983 a fixed-term contract for the use of the US military bases in Greece was concluded, which provided for an evacuation by 1990. In mid-May 1984 he certified that the Soviet Union was genuinely striving for international detente , while accusing the USA of an expansionist policy. He made the dialogue with Turkey dependent on the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Northern Cyprus. In domestic politics, the Papandreou government wavered around liberal reforms of social policy that had nothing specifically socialist .

In the 1985 election , Papandreou was re-elected, albeit with certain losses. But because of the austerity measures introduced, there were strikes at the turn of the year and even a general strike in November. The measures taken to solve internal economic problems did not lead in the right direction. By 1988 the inflation rate was 14% and the deficit in government spending was around US $ 30 billion. Although he was an extremely popular and close to the people politician during his lifetime , the liaison with the stewardess Dimitra Liani-Kapopoulou, which has also been demonstrated in public by Papandreou since 1987, severely scratched his image. But after the elections in June 1989 there was a stalemate that resulted in a political crisis. The main cause for this was the unsolved economic difficulties Greece was facing. The head of the New Democracy, Konstantinos Mitsotakis , ultimately won and formed the new government. Since then, Papandreou's career has been the subject of growing controversy and scandals . In 1989, he divorced his longtime wife Margaret Papandreou to his young mistress, the Olympic Airways - air hostess Dimitra Liani (called Mimi) to marry. This led to an alienation from his adult children, among whom Giorgos Andrea Papandreou was a PASOK minister in his cabinet at the time.

In the same year Papandreou was brought up by parliament in connection with the US $ 200 million embezzlement scandal at the Bank of Crete . He was charged with embezzling some of their accounts with the Bank of Crete, which the PASOK party allegedly used to make money, by ordering state-owned companies to keep part of their accounts. In a process that the New Democracy party and the Communist Party against Papandreou strained, Papandreou was acquitted of all charges for lack of evidence for its involvement in the financial scandal.

Papandreous tomb in Athens

In the October 1993 elections, Papandreou irritated his critics. He won a sovereign election and became prime minister again at the age of 74. But his poor health prevented him from strict political administration. His young wife Dimitra Liani became increasingly political and was accused of preventing him from resigning . Their own political ambitions failed due to a lack of support from PASOK party members. With heart problems and kidney failure progressing , Papandreou was hospitalized in November 1995. Here he struggled with death for several months. This further paralyzed political life in Greece. On January 16, 1996 he resigned from his position. He died on June 23 in Athens in his villa in the suburb of Ekali. Because of his services he received a state funeral . His funeral procession took place with the emotional participation of his followers and party supporters.

heritage

Papandreou was an intensely polarizing personality. A powerful speaker, he was admired by the working class and many people in rural Greece who were drawn to his populist attacks on the rich and his romantic Greek nationalism . He received little recognition from the conservatives, however, as they accused him of corruption and demagoguery , which would ruin Greece's reputation and economy and offend its neighbors.

His great historical endeavor consisted in giving Greece a modern, Western European character with a clear course of pushing back US influence. This resulted from a mixture of socialist and nationalist elements as well as a series of drastic reform laws. Although the "great change" he was striving for was not achieved, he did achieve a clear development in the direction of democratization and liberalization of Greek society.

His successor in office, Konstantinos Simitis, pursued a different political strategy that was less about being close to the people than about factual reforms. He appointed Giorgos Andrea Papandreou , the son of Andreas Papandreou, as foreign minister, who followed the line of Simitis, but also realized his own goals with closer cooperation with Turkey. Simitis resigned in February 2004 and Giorgos Andrea Papandreou was elected chairman of PASOK. This tried with the slogan “Andrea, zeis! Esy mas odhigeis! ” (“ Andreas, you are still alive! You are leading us! ”) To mobilize former political supporters of his father, but was defeated by the Nea Dimokratia under its chairman Kostas Karamanlis . It was not until the elections in October 2009 that the same constellation ended with a clear victory for PASOK.

Fonts

• Greek tragedy. From democracy to military dictatorship. Fritz Molden, Vienna a. a. 1971, ISBN 3-217-00197-4 .
• Critique of American Capitalism. Herder and Herder, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1973, ISBN 3-585-32012-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Andreas Papandreou in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Andreas Papandreou , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 30/1996 of July 15, 1996, in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on February 18, 2019 ( beginning of article freely accessible)
2. ^ Andreas Papandreou. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved February 18, 2019 . 
3. ↑ DIED: Andreas Papandreou . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1996 ( online ).

predecessor	Office	successor
Georgios Rallis Konstantinos Mitsotakis	Prime Minister of Greece 1981–1989 1993–1996	Tzannis Tzannetakis Konstantinos Simitis