A new party was inaugurated in Greece on May 21 promising to break the slavishly pro-NATO, pro-EU consensus of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s ruling New Democracy government. Named Hope for Democracy, the party is led by Maria Karystianou, a medical doctor who became a national figure as a leader of the families of those killed in the 2023 Tempe train crash — among them her own daughter. The party announced its official establishment at a theater in Thessaloniki among hundreds of supporters drawn from political activists, farmers, intellectuals, retired military officers, and the Greek diaspora. Among its founding members and Karystianou’s foreign-policy adviser is retired Greek Ambassador Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, an active supporter of the Schiller Institute and its call for a new security and development architecture.
Karystianou outlined a twenty-point program emphasizing reversal of the austerity policies imposed on Greece by the European Commission and its international creditors, reconstruction of the public education and health systems, support for the family and for young people as “the hope of our country,” banking reform for transparency, judicial and government reforms against chronic party corruption, and a foreign policy grounded in national sovereignty and international law.