Evangelos Venizelos

Evangelos Venizelos (2014)

Evangelos Venizelos ( Greek Ευάγγελος Βενιζέλος , born January 1, 1957 in Thessaloniki ) is a Greek lawyer and politician of the social democratic party PASOK . He has been a member of the Greek parliament since 1993 and has been a minister in various cabinets and deputy prime minister from 1994 onwards, most recently in the Samara cabinet until the early parliamentary elections in January 2015 . Between 2012 and 2015 he was party chairman. In June 2015, he resigned from the PASOK party leadership. His successor is Fofi Gennimata .

Life

Venizelos studied law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from 1974 to 1978 . After completing his studies, he followed up with postgraduate studies at the University of Paris II . In 1980 he received his doctorate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. There he became a lecturer and later professor for constitutional law in 1984 . He also worked as a lawyer at the State Council (Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας) and at the Supreme Court (Άρειος Πάγος). He was also a board member of the National Bank of Greece (at that time headed by Loukas Papadimos ), the National Center for Public Administration and a member of the Local Radio Commission (an independent supervisory body over the radio stations). He wrote numerous writings in the field of constitutional law and political science .

Since the parliamentary elections in 1993 he has been a member of the Greek parliament without interruption as a candidate for the constituency of Thessaloniki 1 of the social democratic PASOK .

Venizelos was rapporteur for the major revision of the Greek Constitution , which began in 1996 and was completed in April 2001.

Between October 1993 and March 2004 he held the following offices in the governments of Andreas Papandreou and Konstantinos Simitis :

• Minister of State to the Prime Minister and Government Spokesman (1993–1995)
• Minister for Communication and Transport (1995–1996)
• Minister for Transport and Telecommunications
• Minister of Justice (1996)
• Minister for Culture and Sport (1996-1999)
• Development Minister (responsible for energy, industry, trade, tourism and technology) (1999–2000)
• Minister of Culture (2000-2004)

In his second term as Minister of Culture from November 2001 to March 2004, Venizelos was responsible for coordinating the preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games .

After PASOK was defeated in the elections in September 2007 , he ran for chairmanship of PASOK, but was defeated by Giorgos Andrea Papandreou .

After PASOK won the parliamentary elections in 2009 , Venizelos took over the post of Defense Minister in the government of Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou on October 7, 2009 .

As part of a cabinet reshuffle following mass protests against the government's austerity measures, Prime Minister Papandreou appointed Venizelos in June 2011 to the office of finance minister, which is particularly important due to the Greek financial crisis, as well as deputy prime minister of his cabinet .

After Papandreou announced a referendum on the austerity plans on November 1, 2011 , Venizelos opposed this plan on November 3. Papandreou offered his resignation shortly thereafter.

After Papandreou's resignation on November 11, 2011, Venizelos was also a member of the Papadimos interim cabinet , which was composed of PASOK and ND . On March 18, 2012 he was elected as the new chairman of PASOK; a day later he resigned as finance minister. Filippos Sachinidis was his successor .

In the Greek parliamentary elections on May 6, 2012 , PASOK was only the third-strongest party with 13.2 percent, after the left-wing alliance SYRIZA with 16.8 percent and Nea Dimokratia with 18.9 percent.

Venizelos as Minister of Culture

In 1998, as Minister of Culture, he campaigned to bid for the Archimedes Palimpsest for the Greek state. After the estimated price of USD 800,000 was exceeded, the consortium of Greek private individuals finally succumbed to the bidding war, which an unknown person won for USD 2.2 million.

In 2001 an exhibition on the architecture of Greece with a focus on the 20th century was shown in the German Architecture Museum - this was initiated by Venizelos as part of the accompanying program of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Greece as a guest country.

In 2000 Venizelos succeeded in convincing the heirs and owners of the Costakis Collection to bring it permanently to Greece, as George Costakis had once wished. The cost of around 1,300 masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde including restoration and preparation amounted to 29 million euros. The works of art were acquired within the budget for the European Capital of Culture, Thessaloniki, and today they form the basis of the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.

Positioning

• Approx. In 2010 Venizelos received data from the Falcani list of Swiss Leaks from the French authorities (the administrative assistance was a requirement of the EU Commission) . The Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis received this list on a USB stick. Vaxevanis' house was searched by 50 police officers, he went to court and was acquitted. The list was never evaluated under Venizelos. Statements such as “there is no proof of origin” and “data from an unidentifiable source are legally unusable” were given as reasons for doing nothing. Venizelos said: "It was only 2 billion euros".
• On January 21, 2012 Venizelos published the names of Greece's biggest tax evaders on the Internet.
• On May 27, 2012, Venizelos accused IMF boss Christine Lagarde of having insulted the Greeks after she said in an interview that she had no sympathy for the Greeks and that they should start paying taxes.
• At the beginning of 2014 - at the beginning of the Greek EU Council Presidency (first half of 2014) - he called on Germany to be more cautious in Europe. It is not easy for Germans to accept “European diversity and the right to a different approach”, but Greece also has a lot to show, for example “impressive fiscal adjustments”. The Troika (which oversees his country's reforms) should be placed under the control of the European Parliament.

Web links

Commons : Evangelos Venizelos  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Web presence (greek)
• Biography on the website of the Greek Parliament (Greek)
• Biography on the website of the Greek Parliament

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Full text Verassungen.eu
2. ↑ Papandreou possibly without a majority .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. FAZ.net , November 3, 2011  
3. ↑ Papandreou sacrifices office . Mirror online
4. ^ Lexi Krock: Inside the Archimedes Palimpsest. In: NOVA. WGBH Educational Foundation, September 30, 2003, accessed March 18, 2016 . 
5. ↑ Swiss Leaks, Falcani and the banking scandal . ArteTV; from min 53
6. ↑ tagesanzeiger.ch
7. ↑ sueddeutsche.de
8. ↑ Lagarde: Greeks should pay their taxes. In: Focus . May 26, 2012, Retrieved August 5, 2012 . 
9. ↑ Germany should hold back . FAZ.net , January 4, 2014