Kyriakos Mitsotakis

Kyriakos Mitsotakis (born March 4, 1968, Athens, Greece) Greek politician and scion of one of Greece’s most prominent political families who became prime minister of Greece in July 2019 at the head of a New Democracy (ND) government. His father, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, had served as prime minister from 1990 to 1993. His sister, Dora Bakoyannis, had been the mayor of Athens when it hosted the 2004 Olympic Games, and her son, Costas Bakoyannis (Mitsotakis’s nephew), became mayor of Athens in 2019. Moreover, Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s grandfather and great-grandfather were members of the Greek parliament, and the most prominent Greek politician and statesman of the early 20th century, Eleuthérios Venizélos, was his granduncle.

Early life and banking career

Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the youngest of Konstantinos Mitsotakis’s four children. In 1967, shortly before Kyriakos was born, his father was arrested as part of the military takeover of the Greek government. Mitsotakis père then fled with his family to Paris. They did not return to Greece until 1973. Konstantinos restarted his political career in 1974 after the fall of the military government and Konstantinos eventually joined the centre-right New Democracy party, becoming its leader in 1984 and the prime minister in 1990.

Against this backdrop, Kyriakos attended the Athens College preparatory school and matriculated to Harvard University, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. While at Harvard he was awarded the Tocqueville and Hoopes prizes for his undergraduate thesis exploring the foreign policy of the U.S. government toward Greece. Mitsotakis continued his formal education at Stanford University, where he focused on issues related to European integration en route to earning a master’s degree in international relations in 1993. He then returned to Harvard and was awarded an MBA in 1995.

Following the completion of his studies, Mitsotakis took a position as a financial analyst with Chase Investment Bank in London (1990–91). He also worked as consultant with McKinsey and Company (1995–97), advising clients primarily in the financial services and telecommunications industries, before returning to Greece and becoming a senior investment officer with Alpha Ventures (1997–99). Two years later he switched employers again, this time assuming the role of chief executive officer of NBG Venture Capital for the National Bank of Greece. In that capacity he was recognized as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the 2003 World Economic Forum.

Start in politics

In 2003 Mitsotakis entered politics, and the following year he won election to the parliament as a member of ND. He would win reelection in 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2015. During his tenure he served on the Defense and Foreign Affairs committee, European Affairs committee, Finance committee, Production and Trade committee, and Constitution Revision committee. From 2007 to 2009 he chaired the Environment committee.

In June 2013 he was appointed minister of administrative reform and e-governance in the administration of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and retained that portfolio until the fall of the Samaras government in January 2015. As minister, Mitsotakis responded to the debt crisis that had forced the Greek government to seek a financial bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund by implementing a widespread reorganization of government institutions and processes. He also oversaw dramatic reductions in the public service workforce and restructuring of the tax administration.

Leader of New Democracy and prime minister of Greece

After the Greek electorate turned to the Syriza party and elevated Alexis Tsipras to the premiership, Mitsotakis sought the leadership of ND. As an advocate of LGBT rights and of a relatively lenient approach to the handling of Europe’s migrant crisis, Mitsotakis faced an uphill battle against those in his party who traditionally opposed gay rights and took a hard line on immigration. His support of private enterprise also ran up against opposition from those in ND who favoured government intervention in the economy. Nonetheless, Mitsotakis, who cast himself as a liberal reformer, was committed to broadening the appeal of his party by moving it from its traditional right-wing stance toward the centre. Ultimately, he triumphed over Evangelos Meimarakis in the leadership battle and became ND leader in January 2016.

In his ascent to the leadership, Mitsotakis sought to make a name for himself rather than simply leverage his famous family’s political legacy. “Judge me by CV, not by my name,” he asked. Mitsotakis also cast himself as something of an unconventional Greek politician. Greek political culture is frequently suffused with hypermasculinity, and Mitsotakis unashamedly went against the grain by wearing a lucky charm bracelet and revealing himself to be a green tea drinker. Moreover, he and his wife, Mareva Grabowski-Mitsotaki, a former Deutsche Bank executive and cofounder of a clothing label, went through a separation that was atypically public for a Greek politician. After several years apart, they reconciled, and she was at Mitsotakis’s side, along with their three children, when he took to the hustings as ND leader.

As leader of the opposition, Mitsotakis was a harsh critic of Tsipras’s stewardship of the economy. He also condemned the agreement that the prime minister struck that settled Greece’s long-standing dispute with what had been the Republic of Macedonia over that country’s name, which was officially changed to North Macedonia. Mitsotakis’s advocacy of privatization, his pledge to create jobs, and his promises to cut spending and taxes appeared to resonate with Greek voters, who presented ND with a decisive victory in the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019. With the solvency of his government threatened by this result, Tsipras called for a snap parliamentary election to be held in early July. Mitsotakis, having engaged in strident partisan criticism of the government during most of his leadership of ND, shifted gears and struck a more conciliatory tone during the election campaign. Mindful that Tsipras had been unable to deliver on many of the bold promises that brought him to power, Mitsotakis was careful not to overpromise.

When Greek voters went to the polls on July 7, they rewarded Mitsotakis by delivering nearly 40 percent of the vote to ND, compared with about 31.5 percent for Syriza. As a result, ND captured an absolute majority in the parliament, with 158 seats, and Mitsotakis became prime minister.

First term as prime minister

At the top of the list of challenges faced by Mitsotakis early in his tenure was combating the COVID-19 global pandemic, which reached Greece in late February 2020. Aware that the Greek health care system had been compromised by austerity cuts, the government sought to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the pandemic by quickly imposing travel restrictions and lockdown measures. Consequently, Greece fared better than many other EU countries during the first wave of the pandemic. However, because the government was slower in responding to later waves of the contagion, the country suffered more during the surges in late 2021 and in 2022. Nevertheless, partly as a result of financial support provided by the European Union during the health crisis and partly because of the return of tourists afterward, the Greek economy bounced back strongly from the impact of the pandemic. Indeed, GDP increased by more than 8 percent in 2021 and by nearly 6 percent in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund. Mitsotakis was quick to attribute that growth and the return of foreign investment to the tax cuts and support for private business that were the cornerstones of his economic policy. Arguably the greatest indicator of Greece’s return to economic stability (cast as an economic “miracle” in some quarters) was the reduction of debt as a percentage of GDP from more than 212 percent in 2020 to 166 percent in 2023. In the process, Greece reached the verge of reattaining investment-grade status in the world financial markets.

As the May 2023 parliamentary elections approached, Mitsotakis and ND leaned hard into those positive economic developments while promising to cut taxes further, spark wage and salary increases, restructure the health care system, and improve infrastructure. The last pledge was especially significant in the wake of the national outrage that had greeted a head-on collision between a freight train and a passenger train in February 2023, resulting in 57 deaths (the deadliest train disaster in Greek history). Mitsotakis’s tenure in office had also been tainted by a scandal involving the Greek intelligence agency’s tapping in 2021 of the phones of at least one journalist and of PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis, among others (allegedly, the phones of more than 30 people had been tapped). Mitsotakis, who claimed to have been unaware of the operation, acknowledged that phone tapping should never have taken place but argued that it was not illegal.

The 2023 parliamentary elections

Notwithstanding that scandal, concerns about threats to the rule of law, and an escalating cost of living (due in large part to economic disruptions caused by the Russia-Ukraine War), Greek voters overwhelmingly endorsed the leadership of Mitsotakis by providing ND with more than 40 percent of the vote in the May elections, compared with about 20 percent for Syriza and less than 12 percent for PASOK. That victory translated into 146 ND seats in the 300-seat parliament, just short of an outright majority. Unwilling to settle for attempting to form a coalition government, Mitsotakis turned over the reigns of power to a caretaker government and set the stage for Greeks to vote again, in late June—this time with a rule in place that would allocate as many as 50 additional seats to the party receiving the most votes. When Greeks went back to the polls on June 25, once again they indicated their preference for Mitsotakis as prime minister, handing ND more than 40 percent of the vote, which was now good for a total of 158 seats in the parliament—a simple majority. Syriza and PASOK had to settle for about 18 percent and about 12 percent of the vote, respectively.