At 50, ruling New Democracy is divided
Former leaders Karamanlis, Samaras snub conservatives’ founding anniversary celebration
Relations between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his predecessors Antonis Samaras and Kostas Karamanlis, long tense, reached a breaking point Friday.
That day, October 4, was the founding date of the party by then-PM Konstantinos Karamanlis, Kostas Karamanlis’ uncle. The founder, just back from an 11-year self-imposed exile abroad, was trying to stabilize the foundations of democracy in a country just freed from the yoke of military dictatorship.
The elder Karamanlis, instead of simply resurrecting the old National Radical Union, his pre-dictatorship party, made a conscious break with the past in order to set up a more modern, center-right party.
The two ND veterans – Samaras has been an MP continuously since 1977 – chose to decline, and return, the invitations of their successor to celebrate New Democracy’s 50th anniversary. They called political reporters, separately, Friday morning to inform them of their decision. Officially, they provided no reason. Unoficially, they disdained the so-called “street party” that took place outside New Democracy’s former headquarters in central Athens as cheapening the party’s image. And, privately, they fumed about Mitsotakis’ monopolizing of the celebration.
The two former premiers “cannot be background scenery to Mr Mitsotakis,” an anonymous source commented. The invitations, the source added, were “hypocritical” and “self-seeking” as Mitsotakis wanted to present a facade of party unity.
This is not the first time Karamanlis and Samaras have coordinated their responses: In July, they used a book launch at the War Museum to all but declare war on Mitsotakis, slamming his foreign policy and, Samaras mostly, the legilslation legalizing same-sex marriage. And while Samaras railed against the EU and its “destructive agenda” of political correctness and rights taken too far, both essentially denounced Mitsotakis as insufficiently patriotic.
In the past couple of weeks, a handful of MPs close to the two previous leaders, many of them officeholders in the 2004-09 Karamanlis government that precipitated Greece’s financial crisis, have become openly critical.
A common question to the government about funds threatening debtors, criticizing legislation they themselves had voted for, prompted a lengthy rebuttal from the Finance Ministry.
