Konstantinos Tasoulas was sworn in as the new President of Greece on Thursday succeeding Katerina Sakellaropoulou, Greece’s first woman president.
In February Greece’s Parliament elected Tasoulas as the next President of the Republic. In the fourth round of voting, Tasoulas gained 160 votes in the 300-member chamber. He required 151 to be elected. All 156 MPs of the governing New Democracy party voted for Tasoulas, in addition to former PM Antonis Samaras and three independent lawmakers.
Tasoulas’s first official trip will be to Ancient Olympia on Monday to attend the election of the new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), highlighting Greece’s historical and cultural significance.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced his nomination of Tasoulas in January.
“His unifying spirit and virtues have been demonstrated by the impeccable manner in which he has, until now, directed the work of the Parliament in a very difficult party landscape,” Mitsotakis added.
He also addressed his decision to break with tradition by nominating someone from the governing majority, arguing that the key criterion is public trust. “Neither the different backgrounds of a president and a prime minister guarantee institutional balance, nor does their political alignment inherently create risks for the state,” he remarked.
Left-wing opposition parties criticized the nomination, accusing Mitsotakis of breaking the tradition of selecting a nonpartisan candidate.
Tasoulas was born in Ioannina, Greece on July 17, 1959. He studied at the Athens Law School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and earned a law degree in 1981.
He also worked as a lawyer in Athens and London, while from 1981 to 1990 he was special secretary of Evangelos Averoff, before being elected mayor of Kifissia.
He holds the record as the Speaker of Parliament with the most votes; having been elected with a record 283 votes “for” (ND, Syriza, KINAL, EL, MeRA25), 15 votes “present” (KKE) and two abstentions (Dimitris Tzanakopoulos and Effie Achtsioglou).
It was also the first time a Speaker of Parliament was elected by open ballot.
The President of the Hellenic Republic, who has mostly a ceremonial role.
He or she regulates the functions of the institutions of the Republic according to Article 30, Paragraph 1 of the Constitution. However, the individual elected holds no actual executive powers.
The institution of the Presidency of the Hellenic Republic was established in 1975, one year after the restoration of democracy in Greece following the seven-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1967 to 1974.
The President is elected by Parliament and serves a term of five years. He or she has the right to re-election only once.
This is a developing story
