AP News, September 14th, 2007
Some call it hereditary democracy.
The mantle of democratic government in Greece has passed from father to son and from uncle to nephew as two rival political dynasties alternated power in the past half-century.
In Sunday's election, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis' conservative government will defend its parliamentary majority against the main opposition Socialists, headed by George Papandreou.
Even outside the country where democracy was invented 2,500 years ago, the names will ring bells.
With the exception of the 1967-74 military dictatorship, a Karamanlis or a Papandreou has served as prime minister for 30 of the 45 years of democratic governance since 1955.
The Karamanlis dynasty is slightly ahead with 17 years in power, to 13 years for the Papandreous.
"The most certain way of becoming prime minister is to be the son or the nephew of a prime minister," quipped far-right LAOS leader Giorgos Karadzaferis during a television debate last week among the country's main five party leaders.
"It seems that there is a certain heredity involved in being a prime minister, and I think the time has come to change this," he said.
It started with the 1956 elections, when the conservative government headed by then-Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis _ the incumbent's uncle _ was challenged by a coalition of centrist and left wing parties that included the Liberal Democratic Union headed by George Papandreou, the current Socialist leader's grandfather.
After the fall of the dictatorship, Constantine Karamanlis founded the New Democracy party his nephew now leads, and ruled Greece until 1981. The conservatives were ousted from power by Socialist PASOK _ founded and led by Andreas Papandreou, George senior's son, and father of the party's current leader.
Andreas Papandreou, a charismatic leader best-known for his fiery anti-U.S. rhetoric, is credited with finally healing the simmering enmity between Right and Left dating from the 1946-49 Civil War. He governed from 1981-89, and from 1993 until a few months before his death in 1996.
His reformist successor, Socialist Costas Simitis, a law professor whose family was not involved in party politics, is widely credited as one of Greece's most effective postwar prime ministers.
Simitis resigned from the Socialist leadership in February 2004, a month before another Costas _ Karamanlis _ won a landslide for New Democracy.
