Kyriakos Mitsotakis

Biography

Kyriakos Mitsotakis was born in Athens in 1968, the son of the New Democracy politician Konstantinos Mitsotakis, later prime minister. The family was under house arrest by the military junta at the time of his birth and soon escaped abroad, returning to Greece in 1973. He graduated from Athens College in 1986, studied social studies at Harvard, took a master's in international policy at Stanford and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School.

He worked as a financial analyst for Chase in London, did his military service in Greece, and spent two years at McKinsey & Company in London. From 1997 to 1999 he was a senior investment officer at Alpha Ventures, part of Alpha Bank, and in 1999 he founded NBG Venture Capital for the National Bank of Greece, which he ran until he left for politics in 2003.

Elected to parliament for Athens B in 2004, he served as minister of administrative reform and e-governance in Antonis Samaras's government from June 2013 to January 2015. After New Democracy's defeats in 2015 he ran for the party leadership as an outsider and won on 10 January 2016, becoming leader of the opposition. He led the party to an outright majority in July 2019 and became prime minister.

His government's record includes a strong economic recovery, the digitisation of public services and the legalisation of same-sex marriage, alongside criticism over migrant pushbacks, press freedom, the 2022 surveillance scandal and the 2023 Tempi rail disaster. After an inconclusive vote in May 2023 he won a majority in a second election in June 2023 and was sworn in again.