Konstantinos Mitsotakis

Prime Minister of Greece. He served as the Prime Minister of Greece from April 11, 1990 to October 13, 1993. He came from a political family; his father and grandfathers were members of parliament, and the statesman Eleuthérios Venizélos was his uncle. He studied law and economics in Athens and was active in the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Crete from 1941 to 1944. During this period, he was twice arrested and sentenced to death. He was first elected to parliament in 1946 as a member of the Liberal Party. In the early 1960s he joined the new Centre Union, a centre-left coalition organized by Georgios Papandreou and he became minister of finance in Papandreou's government. In July 1965 Papandreou became involved in a power struggle with Greece's King Constantine II. He, along with other Centre Union deputies, defected from the party and joined the pro-monarchist forces in a series of coalition governments. His actions incurred the lasting animosity of Papandreou's son, Andreas, who later became prime minister himself. The government crises that followed led to a imposition of a military dictatorship in April of 1967. The new military government arrested him and he eventually fled to Paris, where he was active in the opposition to the regime. He returned to Greece in 1973 and a year later, after the fall of the military government, stood for parliament as an independent liberal but failed to be elected. He founded the centrist New Liberal Party in 1977, and in that same year, was elected to parliament. In 1978 he accepted a cabinet post in the government of Konstantinos Karamanlis, and shortly afterward, joined Karamanlis' centre-right New Democracy Party. In 1984, he became party leader. In April of 1990 he became prime minister after his party won the national elections. His government's economic-reform policies attracted opposition, however, as did its foreign policy, and three years later, his party lost its majority in parliament. He stepped down as prime minister and resigned as leader of the party soon after the loss. He retired from Parliament in 2004.