Konstantinos Karamanlis
Konstantinos Karamanlis governed Greece for eight years in the 1950s, went into exile in Paris for eleven, came home on the French president's plane the night the colonels fell in July 1974, put the country into a republic and the European Community, and was president of it twice; the return is the one moment of the century Greeks of every party still agree on. He was born in 1907 in a Macedonian village then still Ottoman, the son of a teacher and tobacco grower, read law at Athens, and was a deputy from 1935 and a minister after the civil war; as minister of public works from 1952 he built the roads and the dams, and when the prime minister Papagos died in 1955 the king passed over his seniors and chose him. He founded the National Radical Union, won three elections, brought in American money and Greek tourism, signed the association with the Common Market in 1961, and settled Cyprus for a while at Zurich in 1959. The election of 1961, which the left called the election of fraud and violence, and the quarrel with the palace over the queen's trip to London ended it, and he resigned in 1963 and left for Paris. He said nothing in public for eleven years, through the colonels' coup of 1967. When their Cyprus adventure brought the Turkish army to the island in July 1974 and the junta collapsed, the generals who had made it called him. He landed at Athens at two in the morning of 24 July to crowds, formed a government of the old parties within hours and legalised the communists. He held an election in November that his New Democracy won with fifty-four per cent, and put the monarchy to a referendum that abolished it. He wrote the constitution of 1975, tried the colonels and commuted their death sentences, and signed the accession treaty to the Community in 1979 as the answer to every question about where Greece belonged. He was president from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1990 to 1995, and died in April 1998 at ninety-one. His nephew of the same name was prime minister six years later.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 1998 CE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: prime_minister, president, politician
