Andreas Papandreou
Andreas Papandreou was a Berkeley economist and an American citizen who came home to his father's Greece, founded a socialist party in the ruins of the dictatorship, won power in 1981 on the word Change, and governed for eleven years as the tribune of everyone the civil war's winners had kept out; he left a welfare state, a debt, a scandal, a young wife and a party that ruled for another two decades. He was born in Chios in 1919, the son of George Papandreou, the liberal who would be prime minister three times, was arrested under Metaxas as a Trotskyist student, and left for Harvard in 1940; he took American citizenship, served in the navy, chaired the economics department at Berkeley, and came back in 1959 at Karamanlis's invitation to run an economic research centre. His father's Centre Union won in 1963 and Andreas, elected in 1964, was within a year the most hated man in the army and the palace, accused of a conspiracy of officers called Aspida. The quarrel between the king and his father in 1965 opened the road to the colonels' coup of April 1967, in which he was the first arrested. Released after American pressure, he ran the resistance from abroad, and in September 1974 founded PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, with a programme of leaving NATO and the Community and a green sun for a symbol. He took thirteen per cent that year, twenty-five in 1977 and forty-eight in October 1981. In office he left neither NATO nor Europe, but took the money from the second and the argument with the first. He recognised the civil-war resistance, brought in a national health service, civil marriage, equal family law and pensions for the countryside, doubled the public payroll, and paid for it by borrowing. The years 1988 and 1989 brought a heart operation in London, the divorce and the marriage to an air hostess half his age, and the Bank of Crete scandal that had him tried and acquitted; he lost in 1989 and won again in 1993, governing from a sickbed until January 1996. He died that June, and half a million people followed the coffin. His son George was prime minister when the debt came due in 2009.
- Lived: 1919 CE – 1996 CE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: prime_minister, economist, politician
