Adonis Georgiadis
Spyridon-Adonis Georgiadis, better known as Adonis Georgiadis, is a Greek politician, telemarketer and publisher. Currently serving as the Minister for Development and Investment in the Cabinet of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, he is the Vice-President of New Democracy. He previously served as Deputy Minister for Development, Competitiveness and Shipping in the Cabinet of Lucas Papademos and Minister for Health in the Cabinet of Antonis Samaras.
Early career
Georgiadis' ancestry heralds from Lefkada, Macedonia, Pontus, and Smyrna He started working at his father's bookstore at the age of 15. He graduated from the Department of History and Archaeology of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Athens.Political career
Career in municipal polititcs
Georgiadis served as the spokesman for the Popular Orthodox Rally from December 2003 until August 2007. Georgiadis ran for the office of the Prefect of Athens in the 2006 elections and on September 16, 2007 was elected a Member of the Greek parliament. He was re-elected on October 4, 2009 for Athens Β. In November 2010 he was LAOS' candidate peripheral governor for Attica at the Municipal & Prefectural elections.Career in national politics
On 11 November 2011, Georgiadis was appointed Deputy Minister for Development, Competitiveness and Shipping in the coalition government of Lucas Papademos. He resigned on February 11, 2012. On February 13, he was crossed out of the parliamentary team of LAOS due to voting in favor of the Second Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece, against the party line.On 17 February 2012 Georgiadis joined New Democracy, having first given up his parliamentary seat to LAOS. He has since been elected a Member of Parliament, representing Athens B, in the May 2012, June 2012 and January 2015 elections.
He was appointed Minister for Health from June 2013 and served until June 2014. During his term in office, he gave free pharmaceutical coverage to more than 2.000.000 uninsured citizens, with the cost being set at 340 million euros. He also merged hospitals and closed unnecessary ones, curbed the cost of medicine and completed the reform of the National Primary Health Care Network, a reform that had been announced since 1979 but was never done.
In September 2014 Georgiadis was appointed Parliamentary Spokesman for New Democracy. In the elections of January 2015 he was elected in the 2nd district of Athens with 70.853 votes and he was reelected in the September elections.
He was one of the four candidates in the 2015–16 New Democracy leadership election. He campaigned for liberal reforms, tax cuts and cut of public spending and for an ideological battle with the Left, which he considers that it has an ideological hegemony. In the first round he got 11.40% and finished fourth. In the second round he supported Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who won the elections and became new President of New Democracy. On 18 January, he was appointed as one of the two Vice-Presidents of the party.
Television
Georgiadis often appeared on TeleAsty news programmes, a TV channel founded and run by LAOS' leader Georgios Karatzaferis, expressing the opinions of his party. On his daily programme Ellinon Egersis on TeleAsty, along with his brother Leonidas he commented on current affairs, and advertised books of mainly historical and philological interest, both from his family publishing house Ekdoseis Georgiadi and other Greek publishers. He also publishes the magazine Elliniki Agogi, which covers issues of national and historical interest. An organization under the same name of Elliniki Agogi runs lessons of the Ancient Greek language.Work as an author
As an author, Georgiadis has written a historical book titled Homosexuality in Ancient Greece: the Myth Collapses in which he argues that whereas homosexuality was present in Ancient Greece as in other countries, its extent and social acceptance have been inflated. However, in a 2015 TV show discussing his book, he claimed that "homosexuality did not exist in Ancient Greece". He had also previously written a Guide to Ancient Greek Coins. He has also written the historical novel Theodora Phranza: or, the Fall of Constantinople. Greek journalist Tasos Kostopoulos has claimed that this book is the product of plagiarism of a 19th-century English book by John Mason Neale. Moreover, according to Kostopoulos, Georgiadis added some characters to the English original, including Bartholomew, a Jewish advisor to the Sultan Mehmet. In the book, Bartholomew has the following dialogue with the Sultan: "You are a really valuable advisor. Had it not been for your advice, I do not know whether I would be here now, besieging Constantinople. You must really hate the Greeks, since you work so relentlessly for their destruction." To which the Jew answers: "I hate them! Nobody in the world will be happier than I when Constantinople will fall to your hands." Kostopoulos´ claims were supported by a number of Greek journalists. Georgiadis reply was that he had never hidden he had adapted a previous work.Other activities
- European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Ex-Officio Member of the Board of Governors
Political positions
Georgiadis often condemns the opinions expressed in left-wing publications such as Eleftherotypia or by left-wing politicians such as those of Syriza, with both parties having exchanged sharp-tongued criticism. He also routinely condemned the policies of the two former leading Greek parties, New Democracy and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which he viewed as two sides of the same coin. He has often used the term tholokoultoura to group his left-wing ideological opponents:
He often states that the destruction of the Greek economy and Greek society began in 1981 with the election of Andreas Papandreou as PM and the party of PASOK.
During the recent 2015-16 New Democracy leadership election, he accused Syriza of being "a second-time PASOK". He described himself as "liberal" in economic matters, while often stated that is necessary to break the "hegemony of the Left on the ideas" inside the Greek society. He stated "I want to be in Greece, what Nicolas Sarkozy is in France", while rejected the policies of Marine Le Pen and her euroscepticism as anti-European.
Another case of criticism to the Left from Georgiadis' side is about the educational system, and especially the universities system. According to him, the leftists dominate the Greek universities. He has many times expressed his will for the abolition of the "university asylum", stating that it is only a tool for the anarchists to burn and destroy the Greek universities.
Georgiadis is in favour of putting an end to Greece's "eternal students", people who have been enrolled at university for years without graduating. However, he came under attack from Greek media when in December 2012 it became known that he had earned his degree at the age of 31.
Controversy
Georgiadis, in the past, has been accused of "troubling remarks about Jews and his public promotion of an anti-Semitic book by a pro-claimed anti-semite". Georgiadis has countered that he sells these books like other Greek bookstores, saying that he disagrees with their content. In October 2015, when he was a candidate for New Democracy, he described "my engagement with the Plevris Book of the Jews" "the biggest mistake of my political career to date," but he said he never was an anti-Semite. In January 2017, at the Holocaust memorial day, he asked for public apology that he had "coexisted and tolerated the views of people who showed disrespect" to the Greek Jews and who "supported promoted his abusive book Costas Pleuri ".Regarding the Athens Polytechnic Uprising, Georgiadis has claimed that "there was no one dead inside the Polytechnic School, not a single one! The Polytechnic Uprising is the foundational political myth of the ideological domination of the Left in Greece. They got the police report of the previous day, of the same day and of the next day and whoever died in Attica of whatever reason became a victim of snipers." His statements have been criticized by the media. Syriza has called Georgiadis's claims an "ahistorical abjection".
On 16 November 2017, Georgiadis announced that he would cease working as a telemarketer. A few days earlier he came under intense criticism after it was revealed that the healing effects supposedly provided by the nanotechnological jackets that he was promoting were in fact void and based on pseudoscience. Fellow telemarketer Makis Triandafillopoulos had been previously convicted of fraud for selling exactly the same model of nano jackets following an investigation by the Greek consumer protection agency.