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Profile: Greek anti-bailout Popular Unity party leader Panagiotis Lafazanis

Xinhua, September 18, 2015 Adjust font size:

The leader of the newly formed Leftist Popular Union party Panagiotis Lafazanis, a vocal critic of the third bailout program and supporter of the return to drachma, is one of the figures attracting most attention in this electoral race.

Lafazanis led a group of 25 SYRIZA MPs to break away from the Radical Left SYRIZA party's parliamentary group in August to form the new anti-bailout movement, blasting then Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' U-turn from SYRIZA's initial anti-austerity platform.

Following the party rift, Tsipras resigned calling the snap election.

With his new party Lafazanis wanted to "express the spirit and substance of the 62 percent of Greeks who voted no to austerity," he said, referring to July's referendum on the painful draft deal proposed by the country's creditors.

Born in 1951 in the city of Elefsina near the port of Piraeus, Lafazanis studied Mathematics in the University of Athens. He opposed the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 and was persecuted.

He emerged from the Communist Party KKE to join Synaspismos party (coalition) as a founding member in 1992. First elected as a member of parliament in 2000 with Synaspismos, he was re-elected in 2004 and in 2009 as a candidate for SYRIZA, which developed from Synaspismos.

In the cabinet of Tsipras, after the January 2015 election, he was appointed Minister of Productive Reconstruction, Environment and Energy, until he was removed during a cabinet reshuffle after voting no to the third bailout agreement in July.

During the election campaign Lafazanis argues that "all memorandums harm Greece", giving as an alternative the exit from the euro zone and return to national currency which "would certainly have difficulties ... but no difficulties greater than those created by the memorandums."

He is married and has three daughters. Endit