George Papandreou
George Papandreou was prime minister of Greece three times, once in exile as the man the British chose to bring the government home in 1944, and twice in the 1960s at the head of a Centre Union that won the largest majority in Greek history; his quarrel with a young king over who commanded the army in July 1965 opened the two years of crisis that ended in the colonels' tanks, and his funeral in 1968 was the first demonstration against them. He was born in 1888 in Achaea, the son of a priest, read law at Athens and Berlin, and rose as a Venizelist: governor of Chios and Lesbos after the Balkan wars, minister of education from 1930 to 1932, when he built the schools that carry his name, and a founder of a party of his own in 1935 after Venizelos's coup failed. Metaxas interned him. In April 1944, with the communist-led resistance holding most of the mountains and the Greek forces in Egypt in mutiny, the British put him at the head of the government in exile because he was a liberal the left could not call a royalist, and he brought it to Athens in October behind the British army. In December he was prime minister when the police fired on a demonstration in Syntagma Square and the fighting between the resistance and the British began, which he presided over and resigned from in January 1945. He spent the 1950s as the leader of a liberal opposition that could not win, and in 1961 gathered its fragments into the Centre Union and began the relentless struggle against Karamanlis's election of violence and fraud. He won narrowly in November 1963, resigned to force a clearer verdict, and in February 1964 took fifty-three per cent. Then the young Constantine II, king from March 1964, refused in July 1965 to let him take the defence ministry himself while his son Andreas was accused of a conspiracy in the army. Papandreou resigned expecting to be recalled and the king found defectors instead, forty of them, and the apostasy governments of the next two years could not govern. Elections were set for May 1967 that he would have won. The colonels moved on 21 April. He was arrested, held, released ill, and died under house arrest in November 1968; half a million people followed the coffin through Athens shouting for democracy, and the junta let them, once.
- Lived: 1888 CE – 1968 CE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: prime_minister, politician
