Word: papandreou
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Papandreou's first interview after being sworn in confirmed that he might not be the firebrand in office that he was in opposition (see box). Rather than close down U.S. bases immediately, he appears content to open negotiations on the question. Instead of withdrawing from NATO, he now says, Greece will remain a member until it can find a better way to meet its defense needs. And the referendum on European Community membership may never take place, since it would have to be called by President Constantine Caramanlis, who is fervently pro-European. In Brussels, European Community officials professed...
...Western Europe. Papandreou's victory was immediately compared with that of his fellow socialist, François Mitterrand, who was elected President of France five months ago after 23 years of conservative rule. Many French analysts sympathetic to Mitterrand saw the Greek socialists' victory as an affirmation that a fragile democracy had come of age. Pronounced the leftist daily Le Monde: "It is part of a democratic switch from one political party to another that has been all but absent in modern Greek politics...
...Papandreou's victory is the culmination of a quixotic, often controversial career. As a law student in Athens, he was arrested in 1939 and tortured for forming a Trotskyite group and publishing a newspaper opposed to the dictatorship of John Metaxas. The next year Papandreou fled to the U.S., where he earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, became an American citizen, served in the Navy as a medical assistant and married his current wife, Chicago-born Margaret Chant. (They have since had four children.) Only in 1963, when his father, soon to become Prime Minister, persuaded Andreas...
...right-wing government immediately threw Andreas into Athens' dread Averof prison. Freed after eight months, he moved to Stockholm, then to Toronto. It was there that his anti-American and anti-NATO sentiments blossomed. Papandreou loudly claimed that the CIA had engineered the colonels' coup, and blamed Western Europeans for not opposing the military regime more strongly. To Papandreou, Greece's ancient enemy Turkey, also a NATO ally, is more of a threat than the Soviet Union. That notion was reinforced in 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus, an independent island nation with a predominantly Greek population...
...some Greeks, no doubt, Papandreou's appeal lay in his anti-Americanism. Boasted Actress Melina Mercouri, who won re-election on the PASOK ticket from the same Piraeus district in which she filmed Never on Sunday, and who has been appointed Minister of Culture and Sciences in the new government: "The U.S. treated us like a protectorate. Now the Americans will respect...