Greece nominates Avramopoulos as European commissioner
Antonis Samaras Dimitris Avramopoulos Greece Jean-Claude Juncker
Toby Vogel
Samaras rewards party stalwart for years of service, deepening Jean-Claude Juncker’s problem of attracting more women to the Commission.
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POLITICO
Greece has named Dimitris Avramopoulos, the defence minister, as its next member of the college of European commissioners.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras informed Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission’s president-elect, of the appointment on Sunday (27 July).

Avramopoulos is a stalwart of the centre-right New Democracy party, led by Samaras. Avramopoulos had sought the party leadership in 2009 but eventually swung his support behind Samaras in a bid to block the election of Dora Bakoyiannis, Samaras’s principal rival.

Bakoyiannis seemed to be a strong contender for the Commission post, but Samaras appears to have decided that Avramopoulos deserved to be rewarded for his loyalty.

The appointment deepens Juncker’s problem of maintaining the gender balance of the current commission: it brings the number of confirmed appointments to 14, of whom only one is a woman (Vera Jourová, from the Czech Republic).

Juncker is expected to visit Athens for consultations on 4 August. He has called on the member states to provide names of future commissioners by the end of July, but several governments are expected to hold out until the appointment of the EU’s foreign policy chief (and vice-president of the Commission) on 30 August.

Samaras defied calls from Evangelos Venizelos, leader of centre-left Pasok, junior partner in the governing coalition, for Maria Damanaki to continue as European commissioner, according to news reports.

Born in Athens in 1953, Avramopoulos was a career diplomat in 1980-93, a time during which he obtained a master’s degree from Université Libre de Bruxelles; his last post in the service was as diplomatic adviser to then prime minister Costas Mitsotakis.

Avramopoulos left diplomacy and entered politics in October 1993, when Mitsotakis – who is Bakoyannis’s father – was toppled by Samaras, triggering a disastrous general election in which Pasok returned to power.

After a year in parliament, Avramopoulos was elected mayor of Athens in 1995 and served until 2002, when he briefly broke with New Democracy. (He was succeeded as mayor by Bakoyannis.)

His return to the party, in 2004, was rewarded with a post as tourism minister, and in 2006 he was appointed health minister, a post he held until 2009, when New Democracy was voted out of power.

Since New Democracy’s return in 2011, he has served as defence minister, with a brief interlude in 2012 when he was foreign minister.