George Papandreou, the 69-year-old former prime minister of Greece, was discharged from hospital on Friday June 10, where he had been admitted for a pacemaker implant.
Mr Papandreou was in high spirits when discharged from the Euroclinic private hospital. He will resume his program of activities starting with a visit to Budapest next week where he will speak at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Western Balkans.
The American-born politician is the now the deputy of PASOK-KINAL in the Hellenic parliament. Mr Papandreou who served as Greece’s prime minister from 2009 to 2011 ‘opened the books’ to expose Greece’s crippling sovereign debt.
The dramatic Greek Financial Crisis which followed lost him the 2012 election to the conservative New Democracy.
PASOK lost its hold as the primary centre-left party, a position it held since the1980s. A new-left alliance, Syriza, led by Alexis Tsipras won the 2015 election, and is now the official opposition to Greece’s New Democracy government.
Mr Papandreou has worked to revive the prospects of PASOK-KINAL alliance, but it is difficult to know what impact it has had.
George Papandreou is the scion of one of Greece’s great political dynasties. His father, Andreas Papandreou was a former prime minister and the founder of PASOK. He led PASOK to victory in 1981 in a watershed election that marked an historic break in Greece’s bitter Civil War divisions between left-right. Many say he normalised politics in Greece.
George Papandreou’s grandfather, the dynasty’s founder, and his namesake, Georgios Papandreou served three terms as prime minister of Greece (1944–1945, 1963, 1964–1965).