| dc.description.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. | en |