My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country

by Gianna Angelopoulos

  Believe me, I heard the stage whispers. “She ran for office to escape a bad marriage.” True, my marriage was troubled. But exactly what sin had I committed? It wasn’t as if I had abandoned my family to pursue a higher office. A number of my male colleagues wouldn’t have been subjected to similar public scrutiny of their marriage or their motives. But that kind of attack was never aimed at men; it was reserved for women, particularly those who defied political convention and refused to go along to get along. For women, it was always an uphill climb to succeed, especially if they were ambitious about their professional careers.

  Another insult I heard far too often was that I was a narcissist who had run for city council simply to become famous. How unfair. So many other politicians had an easy path to office. They were wealthy and connected to the party by family ties or were already TV personalities well known to voters. They took their renown for granted. I ran to fulfill a dearly held dream of public service, and I made sacrifices, both personal and financial, to do it. If I had become popular it was only because I did my job well. The recognition came at a high price, and personal attacks—orchestrated by people who foresaw that I would become a threat to them in the future—were responsible for a large part of that price.

  One person who wasn’t enamored of me and didn’t bother to hide it was the daughter of Constantinos Mitsotakis, Dora Bakoyannis. As his chief of staff and office gatekeeper, Dora had tried and failed to block me from reaching her father when I made my first foray into politics. She clearly viewed that as a failure she didn’t intend to repeat. She was furious that I had come to New Democracy with no party ties or credentials, viewing my outsider status as a major political sin. “Who is this Daskalaki and what does she want? She thinks she should be elected just because she is beautiful,” she’d sneer to her mother without any concern for who might be listening. I personally overheard her describe me as “audacious and brazen.” In fairness, Dora had good reason to worry about me. She recognized that New Democracy, however enlightened it might have claimed to be, could only tolerate a few women in prominent roles. Any success I might achieve would cast me as a rival and a potential threat to Dora’s own political ambitions.

  After those three years as a tireless advocate for the schools, after finding new and creative solutions for the system’s problems, I was ready to take the next step—indeed the next leap—and run for Parliament. Greece is a “Presidential Parliamentary Republic.” The Greek state has a President and a Prime Minister. The legislative branch consists of one house of government, the Parliament. The Greek Parliament has three hundred members, each of whom is elected for a four-year term.

  I believed I had earned a spot on the New Democracy ticket for the 1989 elections. Despite any lingering resentments, party leader Mitsotakis appeared to embrace my ambitions. He praised my energy and my dedication and promised that I would be included on the party’s parliamentary ticket when the next elections came around.

  When elections were called for June, I readied my campaign. One morning in May, on the day when New Democracy would reveal its ticket, Mitsotakis beckoned me to his office for what I assumed would be his formal blessing. My election team was waiting back in my office and I was prepared to hit the ground running. The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was the news delivered by the party boss. “You know, Gianna, I so wanted to include you,” Mitsotakis began. “But I faced a lot of pressure. There are people who are your elders who have been waiting far longer for this chance.”

  If he was the least bit ashamed of how he had misled me, I didn’t detect it. I was so stunned, hurt, and angry over his betrayal—and humiliated by his choosing the very last possible second to do it—that, for perhaps the first time in my life, I couldn’t even speak. I just sat there staring at him, tears running down my cheeks. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to wear waterproof mascara. He was obviously discomfited by my crying and tried to find some comforting words. “You are so young, Gianna. I promise I will find another time to include you.”

  I put on my sunglasses and left without saying a word. When I got back to my campaign headquarters, I sat alone in my office and cried for another half hour. Then I composed myself, redid my makeup, and summoned my campaign team. Everyone had heard the news on the radio and was as upset as I was, perhaps even more. But I had already made what would prove to be the most critical decision of my political career.

  I wasn’t going to let the party cut me out of its future. I wouldn’t give my enemies the satisfaction. I would take Mitsotakis’s promise for the future at face value—even though I no longer trusted him, I had no real choice—and treat this episode as a mere bump in the road. Instead of withdrawing in bitterness, I used all of the money I had saved for my campaign to send all three hundred thousand voters on my mailing list a letter expressing my enthusiastic support for New Democracy.

  I was convinced that I could reverse this situation and turn it into an advantage. There was one minor flaw in my plan, though. I needed my letter to go out immediately and I was emotionally spent. I feared that I wouldn’t have the composure to craft an upbeat and conciliatory letter without exposing my underlying anger and bitterness. So I asked my most trusted confidant, Lefteris Kousoulis, to write the letter without reflecting my true feelings. He got it pitch perfect: I accepted the decision; I stood by the party; I would work hard for the ticket; and I hoped my day would come. The letter concluded on an optimistic note. “I am convinced that in our common effort for a better Greece—a Greece we all deserve—we will meet again.”

  And we would.

  At the time, however, my team was appalled by my decision. “Have you gone crazy?” they asked. “Are you going to thank them after the miserable way they treated you?” And then I got to hear a lot of “the bastards this” and “the bastards that.” I let them vent, much as I had taken the time to cry. “I can’t pretend this is good,” I told them. “But if I don’t want them to destroy me, I have to make this work for me.” I had made my decision: I never take “no” for an answer—not from the party leaders and not from my own team either.

  Faced with a Gordian knot, I had conceived a masterstroke to cut it. I sent out the letter and went to work as a low-level volunteer in party headquarters. Everybody had their eyes on me as I worked long hours performing the most menial tasks in an ugly campaign office with horrible furniture, writing routine reports about the party platform, going to help build crowds for rallies. I was the fifth wheel. It wasn’t easy to watch the other candidates running where I should have been. But I kept reminding myself that if I didn’t give my very best effort on their behalf, I would wind up the biggest loser in this election—regardless of the actual results. “Gianna, you have no other option,” I kept telling myself. “You may be bleeding, but you are not dead. You must do this if you want to survive.”

  My plan worked to perfection—better, frankly, than I could have ever imagined. Many party people who had dismissed me as brash, egotistical, and self-promoting now realized they had been unfair to me. That was when I won the “heart” of the party and its voters. I had demonstrated to them that I had integrity, that I could be selfless, and that I was someone who actually had the greater interests of the party at heart.

  Thanks to new rules imposed by the Socialist government, the June 1989 election results proved to be a mess. Though New Democracy won the most seats by a comfortable margin, Mitsotakis nonetheless fell short of what he needed to form a government and was again denied his dream of becoming Prime Minister. Instead, Parliament accepted a coalition government with an interim Prime Minister, and new elections were scheduled for November.

  In September, shortly before New Democracy’s ticket would be announced, the terrorist group Revolutionary Organization 17 November assassinated Dora Bakoyannis’s husband, Pavlos, a journalist who had won election to Parliament in the previous election. (Three years earlier, the same group had killed my future husband’s uncle, Dimitris Angelopoulos, one of the n
ation’s leading industrialists.) This devastating tragedy opened the road for Dora to run for Parliament, and she won her husband’s seat.

  As I left Dora’s husband’s funeral in Karpenissi, in central Greece, I sensed that my fate had changed. I looked out the window of the car and saw seven continuous rainbows. I could never have imagined that both his widow and I would enter Parliament two months later and take the oath of office together.

  Be that as it may, when a call beckoned me to Mitsotakis’s parliamentary office two full days before the November ticket was to be announced, I thought maybe somebody was playing a joke—as on Candid Camera—on me. The call, though, was genuine. I was understandably nervous as I drove to meet with Mitsotakis once again. I wasn’t sure I could control myself if he were to betray me a second time.

  This time, however, betrayal was not in the air. From the moment I walked into his office at ten o’clock that night, Mitsotakis was warm and even a little apologetic. “Gianna,” he confessed, “I felt bad that I did not include you last time. But I really appreciated how you acted afterward and how you worked for the party. This time you will be included.” Then came his political prognosis and only then did I get a sense of déjà vu. While the parliamentary district in which I would be running was the same one in Athens I had served on the city council, the stakes were higher and the standards more demanding. The criteria were much stricter. These were national elections, not district, not local.

  Moreover, I would be running against some of the most prominent politicians—“legends” was the term the party leader used—in Athens. It would be impossible for me to pull off another election upset. However, he was confident that this time around New Democracy would win with a sufficient majority to form a new government. He promised that there would be a place for me. In other words, I could expect to lose the election yet be rewarded with a government job.

  But I had never wanted a handout and wasn’t looking for safe harbor in some bureaucracy. I wanted to perform on the country’s biggest political stage. From the moment I was included on the ticket, I ran like an athlete at the peak of her game. I went nonstop for forty-five days. I campaigned everywhere and talked to everyone. People would warn me: “Don’t go there. It’s all Communists,” or “Stay away from there. It’s all Socialists.” I ignored all such advice. I would tell those voters: “Okay, I know you support another party. But hear me out because, for all our differences, we share the same problems.” I would take a similar approach during Athens’s campaign for the 2004 Summer Olympics, engaging all of the International Olympic Committee’s voting delegates, including those who were committed to rival cities.

  I didn’t come up with any gimmick quite as clever as the basil seeds, but I did have a few novel campaign ideas. My pamphlet featured a list of what I viewed as the critical responsibilities of government. It bore my signature, signed on a blackboard. This was my way of showing that these weren’t just empty phrases; I pledged myself wholeheartedly to every word written there. I asked voters “to sign with me” if they shared these beliefs. I literally had them sign a document, hoping that would create a genuine bond between us.

  I also created a stir by passing out a pamphlet that saluted all the women who had served in the Greek Parliament regardless of their party affiliations. The list included Mrs. Eleni Scoura, who, in 1953, became the first woman elected to the Greek Parliament. Mrs. Scoura was a tremendous inspiration to me, which I shared with her when—to her surprise—I visited her in the hospital before the election.

  The list on my pamphlet also included the name of Melina Mercouri, one of Greece’s national treasures. An internationally known actress whose performance in Never on Sunday won her the best actress award at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and a nomination for best actress at the Academy Awards, she was a vocal opponent of the military junta that ruled Greece into the mid-1970s. She was first elected to Parliament in 1977 and became the first female Minister of Culture for Greece in 1981. Among her many other accomplishments was the movement Melina spearheaded to reclaim the sculptures that once graced the Parthenon but are held in the British Museum.

  My only regret in publishing this pamphlet was that there were so few women to mention.

  Greek politics in 1989 was even more polarized and bitter than American politics is today. The leading parties portrayed each other as intractable and the opposition politicians as mortal enemies. And sadly, both sides insisted they were right. I maintained that there was middle ground. And unless we faced our common problems together—with open minds across party lines—we would never find any solutions. It was a simple, perhaps idealistic notion, but voters seemed eager to embrace it as the fresh thinking of youth.

  Again my hard work paid off. I won the seat in Parliament with a total of 28,625 votes. The following year I was reelected with almost 36,000 votes. I’m not sure New Democracy ever grasped why I was successful at the polls; they seemed to dismiss my good fortune as a fluke or an aberration. But I understood why voters responded to me. They were contemptuous of the nation’s politics but didn’t lump me in with all the conventional politicians. I respected them enough to tell them the truth about what needed to get done and how challenging it would be to do it. I didn’t make promises I couldn’t keep. Constituents took me at my word. And between voters and elected officials, trust was the rarest bond of all.

  I had dreamed of becoming a member of the Hellenic Parliament. But even after I won my first election, I didn’t believe that my dream had come true until I walked up the red carpet into the Parliament building. Shivers shot up my spine as I realized that I was walking the same path that Greek legislators had walked since the Parliament’s founding in 1843.

  With my right hand raised, I repeated the vow, “In the name of the Holy Trinity I swear to be faithful to my Country and the Democratic State, to obey the Constitution and its laws, and to consciously fulfil my duties.”

  More shivers were to come later in the evening when I met another female member of Parliament, the woman whose picture had graced my campaign flier: Melina Mercouri. She was one of only a few individuals who were known throughout Greece by her first name. And as it turned out, as I became a public figure, I would begin to be identified by my first name, Gianna—a symbol of the closeness and comfort people felt with me. But it was the thrill of a lifetime when the seventy-year-old Melina embraced me warmly. “You are so beautiful,” she said, clasping my hands. “You can do whatever you want in life. Decide and just do it. Don’t ever listen to all those men bastards around you!”

  I ARRIVED IN PARLIAMENT eager to continue the work I had begun on the Athens city council. I wanted to improve education and the quality of life for all Greeks. One thing I was not interested in was acquiring privileges and other perks of office that seemed to fascinate many of my fellow Parliamentarians.

  It took only a few weeks after winning a seat in Parliament before the glow of my victory turned into a slow burn. I arrived one day to find the whole place abuzz with excitement. I learned that the Angelopoulos family, one of Greece’s most prominent, was hosting a special ceremony in Istanbul to honor the Greek Orthodox Church. The ceremony was to be held at the Church of St. George in Fanar, for more than four centuries the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of all Greek Orthodox Christians. Burned many times over the centuries, the Church of St. George today is modest in size, in accordance with Islamic laws governing the construction of churches in what was once the capital of the Ottoman Empire. But the interior of the church is a magnificent space with majestic colonnades and rich ebony pews.

  The Angelopoulos family had offered an all-expenses-paid trip to all the members of the Hellenic Parliament. All of them, that is, except me.

  I knew of the Angelopoulos family’s reputation from what I had read in the press. In the 1920s, the family decided to leave their impoverished home in the mountainous Arcadia area of the central Peloponnese to try their luck in Athens. Starti
ng with nothing but a strong work ethic, they built a small operation to manufacture metals and steel wire. After their steel plant was destroyed in World War II, they rebuilt it. Their steel business underwent successive phases of modernization and expansion, playing a major role in the reconstruction of postwar Greece. The family interests diversified into operations in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, as well as into shipping.

  The dean of the family was the late Theodore Angelopoulos. His four sons, Angelos, Yiannis, Panagiotis, and Dimitris, followed divergent paths. Angelos, who was not involved with the family business, was an economist with an international presence. He had been a supporter early on of an alliance government in postwar Greece that included leftist members, and he took responsibility for the portfolio of social services. Yiannis passed away at an early age. Panagiotis (my husband’s father) worked in the family enterprise. The “brain” of the family was Dimitris, a brilliant businessman who became my husband’s mentor. As I mentioned earlier, tragically Dimitris was assassinated in 1986 by the terrorist group Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

  In addition to being a successful industrialist, Panagiotis Angelopoulos was a devoted supporter of the Greek Orthodox Church. He had funded a three-year renovation of the Church of St. George as well as the reconstruction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s main building, which had burned down in 1941.

  Panagiotis Angelopoulos would also be celebrating his eightieth birthday that weekend, and the entire Greek government and Parliament were invited to attend the ceremony where he was to be honored with the title grand logothete, the highest honor bestowed by the Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church. Today, his son—my husband—holds that same honor.

  Thus, the ceremony honoring Panagiotis Angelopoulos was a major social and spiritual event, and the most prominent Greek businessmen, politicians, and spiritual leaders would be vying for the opportunity to be counted among the select few to witness the ceremony at the Church of St. George.