The Greek General Election of 2009: PASOK - The Third Generation

Abstract

Although Greece is not a Constitutional Monarchy, historians of the future would probably benefit from the terminology used in this type of state in order to describe Greek politics of the last half century: ‘After the 2009 Parliamentary election’, the text would go, ‘held on 4 October, only two years after the previous general election, Papandreou the Third, after his grandfather in the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s and his father in the 1980s and 1990s, became the new Prime Minister of the country. He achieved this by defeating his main opponent, Karamanlis the Second, who, like his uncle in the mid-1970s, had won two successive electoral battles, in 2004 and 2007, before experiencing this utterly bitter defeat in 2009. After Karamanlis’ resignation, four candidates for the leadership of the party emerged, one of whom was Dora Bakoyanni, the daughter of Kostantinos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece from 1990 until 1993. Her much younger brother, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was also re-elected as an MP of the party.’ Trying to sketch the factors that led to the final outcome, which resulted in the Panhellenic Socialist Movement’s (Panellinio Sosialistiko Kinima, PASOK) return to power, it is essential to account for the first and probably most intriguing puzzle of this election, that is, the reasons that it came so soon before the actual end of the incumbent’s term.