Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ skills and luck

Kyriakos Mitsotakis proved to be the right man at the right time when he was elected to lead New Democracy in 2016. The party needed someone who knew the mechanisms of politics from an early age and, at the same time, was seen as an outsider, a technocrat who could deal with the populism of the SYRIZA-Independent Greeks government. The same applied a few years later when, in 2019, he was elected to govern a country whose citizens had had their fill of easy promises and were looking for stability and growth. Since then, Mitsotakis has governed with skill and determination. He has proved also to possess something as important as skill: luck.

His father, Konstantinos, was famously unlucky. His greatest misfortune was that throughout his political career he was up against Andreas Papandreou, the legendary founder of the populist PASOK party. Kyriakos has Alexis Tsipras as his...