Georgos Gennimatas ΓΕΩΡΓΟΣ ΓΕΝΝΗΜΑΤΑΣ
Born June 1939, Athens Died April 1994, Athens
Fofi Gennimata ΦΟΦΙ ΓΕΝΝΕΜΑΤΑ
Born November 1964, Athens Died October 2021, Athens
PLAZA, Number 80A
The idea that politics is a family affair in Greece goes right back to the founding of the modern state. Greek freedom fighters fathered children who eased into government positions, sometimes on the fame of their name, but also because of a real desire to be of service to the country. Until the First World War, it was practically de rigueur to have had a grandfather or great grandfather who was a fighter, a prime minister, or a minister in one or more of the many governments that the 19th and early 20th century produced. This tendency is no less evident in modern times when three members of the Papandreou family have served as prime ministers since 1960 and the Mitsotakis clan has produced two Prime Ministers, and two mayors of Athens. No one seems surprised or unduly wary when the son or daughter of a prominent politician chooses to carry the family torch on into a new generation and it is also a fact that, in many cases, political families have served Greece well. This is particularly true in the Case of Georgos Gennimatas and his daughter Fotini (Fofi).
Georgos Gennimatas was one of the earliest followers of Andreas Papandreou and his socialist PASOK party and was instrumental in forming the Party’s agenda in the 80s. He was given many portfolios but it was as Minister of Health that he is remembered. He held that portfolio when the National Health care system (ESY) was introduced in 1983. Whatever its systemic flaws, ESY has benefitted the nation to such an extent that it would be hard to find a Greek citizen who does not today see free and local healthcare as a human right. His daughter Fofi entered politics in 2000, became the head of PASOK in 2015 and managed to lead it towards a more centrist position that is in keeping with the temper of the times. Both were engaging personalities: hard working and low key. They both died young, a fact that gives their careers real poignancy. In a country so bitterly divided by political factions, they were respected by everyone who knew them – no mean feat.
His Life
Georgos was born in Athens in 1939. His father, Theodoros Gennimatas, who hailed from the Mani, was a great influence. He was a lawyer and economist who became an advisor to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an agency first formed after 1943 to offer aid to victims of the war and would later become an advisor to the American embassy in Greece. His mother, Fotini, came from Simi, a small island in the Dodecanese between Rhodes and the Turkish mainland. Aside from his family seeking refuge in Thalames in the Mani during the civil war, Georgos spent his childhood years in Athens and attended high school in the Plaka where he excelled. As a civil engineering student at the Athens Polytechnic University he supported the Cyprus efforts to expel the British and join Greece and then became a member of the Centre-Union party of Georgios Papandreou, a new party with social democratic ideals that would be thwarted by the military dictatorship that took over in Greece in 1967.
In 1962, Georgos was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a debilitating ailment that he would not allow to slow him down in spite of the difficulties it engendered. In 1964 He married Katerina (Kakia) Vergou the childhood sweetheart he had met during his family’s holidays on the island of Simi. Throughout his life he would refer to her as his muse and Simi as his refuge from the political fray. They had two daughters, Fotini (Fofi) and Mary.
Kakia with Fofi and Mary
From 1964 Georgos worked in the Agricultural bank and rose through the ranks for the next 19 years. From 1974 until 1979 he was also the head of the Union of Civil Engineers in Greece.
In the aftermath of the political dictatorship of the colonels (1967-1974), many liberals felt that the conservative government of Constantinos Karamanlis was not moving the country forward. Gennimatas joined PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement), the party created and dominated by Andreas Papandreou in 1974 and quickly became an important member of that party’s inner circle. In 1981 he ran for election and won, as did PASOK which ousted the conservatives and formed Greece’s first stable socialist government.
Gennimatas became Minister of the Interior. During his tenure, civil marriage was legalized for the first time, and the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18.
From right to left: Miltiadis Pappaioannou, Melina Merkouri, Georgos Gennimatas, Sostas Yitonas and Thanasis Tsouras. Miltiadis Pappaioannou and Thanasis Tsouras would become close personal friends.
Gennimatas supported the return of the Greek political refugees who had fled the country after the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. They were approximately 100,000 strong, spread out into Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. He argued that the existing laws against their return to the political and social life of Greece was a step backward, that it was time to heal old wounds and, as he put it in one interview: to build on the ruins of the war with new blueprints that can give the Greek people the strength and power to live and thrive. (1) The law allowing their return passed in December of 1982.
Gennimatas with his wife, Kakia
The National Health System
It was during his time as Minister of Health and Welfare that the law was passed creating the National Health System, ESY – a revolution in the development of Greek health care which was previously chaotic and piecemeal. In 1953 the conservative government of the time had made a first effort to establish a Greek wide health network by obliging medical students to work an obligatory few years in rural areas as civil servants. Of course, they left as soon as they could to lucrative urban centres, leaving the rural population faced with a revolving door of young doctors whom they never really got to know. The establishment of ESY was meant to address the critical problem of primary care throughout the entire country, especially in rural areas. It created urban and rural health centres accessible to all, and free. 150 Health centres were formed and there were plans for more. The idea was to integrate ESY with other medical services: to reorganize public hospitals, surgeries and labs, and to educate more medical personnel throughout the country. It did not all happen because Gennimatas had to contend with the entrenched vested interests of the private medical sector.
The 1980s represent the heyday of PASOK. Its fortunes began to wane in the 90s along with their charismatic leader’s health and popularity. 1989 brought about a caretaker government because no one party achieved a majority. Gennimatas, a figure acceptable to all, was chosen to serve as economy minister. He was popular, sincere, low key, hard working and, above all, a listener (2)
He was diagnosed with lung cancer in January of 1992 and underwent surgery in New York that same year. Still he ran for election in 1993, won, and became Minister of Economy under PASOK. But he died on April 25, 1994, just seven months after the death of his wife who had succumbed after her own 10 year battle with cancer. He was 55 and she was 54.
He had come to represent what his daughter would call “the bright side of politics” and he was mourned on both sides of the aisle. Many hospitals in Greece bear his name today.
The bust of Gennimatas in Thalames Messenia (unknown artist)
Her Life
Fofi was born in 1964. She and her sister Mary grew up in Athens. She studied political science at the University of Athens and graduated in 1987 at the age of 22, married Alexandros Deka, and began a career at the National Bank of Greece. Her greatest difficulty in these years was her effort to prove the doctors wrong who had told her she could never have children. Her daughter Aimilia was born in 1996, two years after Fofi had lost both of her parents in such a short space of time. She would later say that one of her great regrets was that her parents and her children would never meet.
Fofi had resisted the idea of following her father into politics, feeling that people would think she was capitalizing on his name. But PASOK was in desperate need of new blood and she was persuaded to run for parliament in the 2000 election, an election she won decisively with 72,000 votes. She proved to be no mere figurehead, and served as a member of the executive bureau and political council of PASOK from 2003 to 2009. With the support of PASOK, she ran and became the governor of the Athens- Piraeus prefecture, a position she held from 2002 until 2007.
Meanwhile she had divorced, married her second husband, dentist Andreas Tsounis in 2003. It was a happy marriage and they had two children together, Georgo and Katerina. Fofi, whose life, by this time, was always newsworthy publically hailed her husband as her pillar of strength. Life was good.
Fofi with her her children, Aimilia, Katerina, and Georgos
Then, in 2008, at the age of 44, she was diagnosed with breast cancer; her son was only two years old. Her handling of this disease which most Greeks still avoid even naming was groundbreaking and typical of her personality. She made her diagnosis public, arguing the importance of psychology –which she believed next in importance to the science of the disease: silence about cancer gains nothing; it must not destroy us. That does not mean it did not shake her world. She said,
It is incredibly difficult to think that your children will grow up without you
And
I have learned not to waste a minute and to see the positive side of things (3)
In 2009, she was again elected to parliament and in 2010 briefly became Deputy Health and Welfare Minister and Alternate Minister of Education, under the premiership of Georgos Papandreou, Andreas’ son and political heir. She became the spokesperson for PASOK in 2012 and its president in 2015, only the 4th woman ever to head a Greek political party.
PASOK , which had been a powerhouse when her father was a minister, was in freefall. The party that had stormed into power in 1981 on the cry of ‘change’, had failed to move with the times, had perhaps depended on Andreas Papandreou’s one man rule for too long, and had never effectively solved its internal power struggles.
In 2009, under the leadership of Georgos Papandreou, the party had received 43.92% of the votes and a mere majority of two with 150 seats in parliament. In 2012 it received 13.18 percent of the vote and 41 seats. By 2015 it received 4.7 percent of the vote and only 13 seats. Syriza, the new far left party had swept into power with a far more radical position than PASOK.
This situation might have sunk any other political leader without a trace, but Fofi, after several missteps, managed to lead the party into a more centrist position under a new alliance called KINAL (The Movement for Change) in November, 2017. She was quick to point out that whereas Andreas Papandreou had led a socialist party, she was leading KINAL (under the umbrella of PASOK) as a social democratic party. She had managed to shift the party more towards the centre.
On October 12 of 2021, Fofi had to resign because her cancer had progressed to a point where even her determination to continue no longer availed. Nine days later she died at the age of 56.
Her outgoing personality, humanity, and integrity, meant that she was mourned both by her own followers and by people who would never have considered giving her their vote. Like her father before her, she had illuminated the “bright side of politics”.
Her body lay in state at the Athens cathedral, the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared a national day of mourning, and she is buried in her family’s grave in the Plaza of the First Cemetery.
Plaza, Number 80A
The Map
Footnotes
(1) Γεώργιος Γεννηματάς: https://kinimaallagis.gr/gggg/uploads/2020/04/giorgos-gennimatas.pdf?fbclid=IwAR07Zz0po5Xv5BMkDl55UF3ntkQ8mvyI39LvuZfKzNK_Dsi7LHUHcFp76II
(2) This description gains even more credence because the article was published in the conservative leaning newspaper Kathimerini on an anniversary of his death
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου