Which interests are betting on… Stournaras’ prime ministership?
During the period of the country’s governance by Antonis Samaras and Evangelos Venizelos, in that historic “Grand Coalition” that was formed between New Democracy and PASOK after the double elections of 2012, so that the country’s bankruptcy could be avoided and its memorandum obligations implemented, Yannis Stournaras was appointed Minister of Finance.
The… urban legend refers to this appointment as a product of… luck. The serious and measured Vassilis Rapanos, who was the first choice of Antonis Samaras and Evangelos Venizelos, faced health problems, resulting in him withdrawing his candidacy from the relevant discussion and opening the way for the appointment of Yannis Stournaras to the General Accounting Office.
Difficult years followed, Stournaras’s economic policy was linked to the bleeding of the popular strata and the impoverishment of Greek society as a whole, led to a dramatic shrinkage of the electoral appeal of Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy and Evangelos Venizelos’s PASOK and finally opened the door for Alexis Tsipras’s… assault on power.
Yannis Stournaras himself had managed to… get off the train, with his appointment by Antonis Samaras to the leadership of the Bank of Greece, where he remains… until today.
The recent intense confrontation of Yannis Stournaras with Alexis Tsipras over aspects and behind-the-scenes details of the 2015 – 2019 period opened two separate chapters in the analysis of individual data, which, however, are inextricably linked to each other. From the one side, the future ambitions of Yannis Stournaras. And, from the other, his past in… appointments.
The current governor of the Bank of Greece seeks a third term, by the hand and with the signature of the current Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. From the other side, however, he would look even further and higher, provided that the circumstances of the conjuncture that will be formed will facilitate him. To be the country’s next prime minister, the one who will succeed Kyriakos Mitsotakis at the Maximos Mansion, as the appointed head of a new coalition government between New Democracy and PASOK and… something more.
The second chapter concerns Yannis Stournaras’s past in… appointments. He has never been elected, he has never sought popular approval, let alone has he ever won it. He started from the office of Yannos Papantoniou and continued with him, alongside Kostas Simitis. During the period of the unpunished Stock Market scandal. During the period of Greece’s entry into the EMU with… falsified data, as the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has stated.
Part of the system, then. With many interests… betting on an appointed prime ministership of his.
