On August 2, the day of the birthday and death of New Democracy minister and MP Yiannis Varvitsiotis, I tried to summarize in a few words his personality, as I perceived it during the years when we were both in Parliament. So I said, very elliptically, that “he was of old, solid stock. He was ideologically and politically consistent. A loyal parliamentarian, a respectable opponent, a leading figure of his party, an excellent interlocutor, a charismatic storyteller, a good friend, a patrician, a lover of our cultural heritage.”
As government spokesman for the last PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou, I carefully followed the leadership battle within New Democracy in 1993. Varvitsiotis fought political battles to win them, but he knew how to lose – a quality that allowed him to submit both himself and the political moment to the course of history. He wanted recognition, but he was not vain. I remember with great appreciation his visit to my office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the spring of 2014, when he tactfully asked me whether, as president of PASOK at the time, I could accept his candidacy for President of the Republic, after the end of the term of our mutual friend Karolos Papoulias. He was not interested in assuming the office, but in hearing that the other main party of the bipolarity that emerged after the restoration of democracy (which was suffering the catalytic effects of Greece’s economic crisis) considered him a person acceptable for this top institutional role.
