In the past 50 years of Greek history, government leadership was assumed by two main families, Karamanlis and Papandreou – the first one leading a right-wing government for 14 years and the second one a leftist government for 15 years. Seven years of that period were of military dictatorship, and four years, the country was “not governed” – 11 years in total. What does that mean that only 10 years in half a century (20%), power was held by someone other than the two families.
It is a situation unprecedented in any other country in Europe. At the leadership of Greece Papandreou family had Papandreou father (Georgios), Papandreou son (Andreas) and Papandreou grandson (Georgios), who now is getting ready to leave the scene. In the Karamanlis family, “father” (Konstantinos) was Prime Minister four times, if we count for more than 50 years that we have taken into account here, but also President of Greece. Karamanlis nephew (Costas) was only prime minister. In the past 50 years, Greece had only eight prime ministers, of which only three were not called Papandreou or Karamanlis.
Besides these two big political families, there are two smaller, Simitis, who gave a prime-minister (Konstantinos Simitis, between 1996 -2004) and Venizelos (from which the current Minister of Finance comes). The first Venizelos (Eleftherios Venizelos) was a Greek revolutionary and served as Greek prime minister from 1910 to 1920 and from 1928 to 1932.
The journalist Costas Douzinas wrote a little while ago in a Guardian article how the politics worked in Greece and what is about to change in the country after the terrible dead end that it reached. Douzinas explained then the fact that Greece is fully divided: on one side there are politicians, bankers, fraudsters and “barons”, on the other side is the people. What Papandreou achieved last year, he argues, was to abolish the gap between left and right. It would have been replaced with the gap between “elite” and “people”. And people are now ready to articulate the history indictment, he said.