Christos Papoutsis resigns

Colleagues of PM Lucas Papademos were surprised at Christos Papoutsis’ decision to resign from his position as Minister of Citizen Protection. The same people made their discontent clear about the fact that Mr. Papoutsis resigned while an emerging terrorist organization assumed responsibility for placing a high-powered explosive device in the Metro.

A meeting was convened on Monday afternoon to select the new Minister of Citizen Protection. In the first few hours after Mr. Papoutsis' resignation, the  favorite to succeed him as Minister of Citizen Protection appeared to be secretary general and former Department Head of the Greek Police, Mr. Lefteris Economou. Shortly before the meeting, it was also thought likely that the possibility of promoting Deputy Minister Manolis Othonas was being considered.

At Mr. Papoutsis' initiative, the “dance” of the PASOK presidential nominations in view of elections within the party on March 18 is beginning. Christos Papoutsis announced via his personal website that he sent the Prime Minister Lucas Papademos a resignation letter from the Ministry of Citizen Protection in order to be able to claim the presidency of PASOK. He is essentially the first official candidate for the leadership battle, while Evangelos Venizelos has not yet made an official announcement and Harris Kastanidis and Luka Katseli, who had expressed interest, are now outside the parliamentary group and are considering setting up a new center-leftist party.

Mr. Papoutsis had been focusing on collecting the signatures of MPs and national PASOK council members to make his candidacy - which requires 100 such signatures - possible. With this move, Mr. Papoutsis is trying to take people by surprise, since no one thought he would resign this early, and a similar motion by Mr. Venizelos is expected when he stabilizes the framework around the debt issues of the country and the support of the economy. The resigning minister is attempting to use his time to cover the distance which separates him from Mr. Venizelos, since a large part of the party personnel has rushed to the side of the latter.

The focus is now on the ideological and political position which will be adopted by Papoutsis, since his intention is to express the so-called “anti-memorandum” side of PASOK. One question is what relations he will form with MPs who downvoted the new memorandum and whether he will manage to avoid leaks of such forces to PASOK’s “left”.

The contradiction he is called upon to handle is how he will manage all this when he himself has voted for the memorandum measures.