ATHENS
Greek lawmakers on Wednesday elected a close ally of conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as the country’s president and head of state.
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Constantine Tassoulas, 65, the former chief of parliament, replaces outgoing President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, a former senior judge, for a five-year term. Sakellaropoulou, elected in 2020, was Greece‘s first woman president.
In Greece the post of the head of state is largely ceremonial, with candidates nominated by the premier.
Tassoulas had been head of parliament since Mitsotakis was elected in 2019 and is considered close to the conservative New Democracy party’s nationalist wing.
He called his election a “paramount honor” and a “major responsibility.”
The lawyer and father of two is a political veteran. First elected as a lawmaker in 2000, he served as culture minister, deputy defense minister and party general secretary in parliament.
But it took four rounds of voting to elect him, with the ruling New Democracy party unable to deliver the support of the 200 MPs originally needed.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mitsotakis said Tassoulas would act as a “symbol of national unity” and “a guarantor” of Greece’s democratic and constitutional stability.
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As mayor of the wealthy Athens suburb of Kifissia, Tassoulas had been accused of attempted blackmail by a land developer. He was already a lawmaker by the time a lawsuit was filed in 2001, and parliament refused to lift his immunity. He has called the charges politically motivated.
There have also been claims by families of the victims of Greece’s worst train disaster, in which 57 people died in 2023, that Tassoulas, as head of the parliament at the time, did not do enough to investigate the disaster.
Greece’s main opposition socialist Pasok party has called for a parliamentary inquiry into why the disaster scene was bulldozed just days after the crash, potentially destroying vital evidence into the causes.
