Andreas Papandreou was a radical leftist nationalist firebrand who was PM of Greece in the 1980s who threatened to (but never did) leave both NATO and the EU and instead pursue a non aligned pro Soviet foreign policy.

Paradoxically he was also an American. He held the departmental chair at the Economics Faculty of the University of California and was a prominent member of the Democratic party in California.

In the end, I now regard him of a snake oil merchant and a demagogue, at least to some extent.

I most certainly didnt at the time!

As we all know, the USA seems to always furnish snake oil merchants. The current USA President is a far greater ” exhibit” of being a “snake oil merchant” than Papandreuou ever was.

Indeed the very term derives originally from the USA.

Be that as it may, Andreas Papandreou was always genuine in his Greek patriotism and love of Greece. He in fact was born directly into the political pedigree of the nationalist republican Greek establishment from his father George Papandreou who was in turn a protege of Eleftherious Venezuelos.

He did capture the hearts and minds of so many Greeks in the 1970s and 1980s following the collapse of the Junta in 1974 both in Greece and the diaspora communities.

It was just most unfortunate that he became wedded to fixed ideological positions, especially his overly overt pro Soviet propaganda.

That alienated many including the French, much of the mainstream European left and many in the diaspora, mainly the American diaspora, who were initially at least sympathetic to the plight of Greece from the Greek Junta and of course from the machinations of the Johnson and Nixon/ Kissinger administrations in the USA.

He should have known better. He was a highly trained and respected academic.

But it suited his ego as a saviour of Greece to peddle deceptively straightforward solutions to popular aclaim that would perpetuate his and his party’s rule.

So that in the end not only was he a genuine “national liberation hero” but paradoxically at the same time he became something of a demogogue and snake oil merchant.

He left a mixed legacy for Greece and the Greeks.

Panayiotis, Sydney, Australia