Kostas Karamanlis
Kostas Karamanlis was prime minister of Greece from 2004 to 2009, the nephew and namesake of the Konstantinos Karamanlis who had founded New Democracy and restored the republic in 1974, elected in March 2004 at forty-seven, the youngest since the war, five months before the Athens Olympics, which he delivered on time at a cost of nine billion euros, twice the budget. His government's audit of the books, ordered in his first weeks, told Eurostat that Simitis's deficits had been above three per cent every year since 1997 and Greece should not have joined the euro when it did. That was true, and his own deficits, at six per cent in 2004 and fifteen in 2009, the last of them revealed only after he had lost, made it worse. The years were the growth of four per cent on borrowed money. There were the fires of August 2007 that burned the Peloponnese and killed sixty-seven, and the Vatopedi land-swap scandal in which a monastery traded a lake for state property. There was the shooting of a fifteen-year-old by a policeman in December 2008 that brought three weeks of riots, and there was the veto on Macedonia's NATO membership at Bucharest in April 2008, which the country applauded. He was born in Athens in 1956, studied law at Athens and international relations at Tufts, and took a doctorate on Greek foreign policy in the 1950s. He was elected to parliament for Thessaloniki in 1989, and took the party's leadership in 1997 after two defeats, as the name and the fresh face. He lost to Simitis by a point in 2000 and beat George Papandreou by five in 2004 and by four in 2007. He called an early election in October 2009 with the economy in recession, saying the country needed a mandate for hard measures he did not name, and Papandreou beat him by ten points and found the deficit. He resigned the leadership that night. He has sat in parliament for Thessaloniki since and said little. He is the last prime minister before the crisis, which his critics and his own audit share the credit for.
- Lived: 1956 CE – ?
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: prime minister, politician
