2024-07-25 09:22:08
More than 1,500 guests attended the reception given last night by the President of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, on the occasion of 50 years since the restoration of democracy in the country in 1974.
On 24 July 1974, the military junta was forced to hand over power to a civilian government headed by Konstantinos Karamanlis following Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus following a coup against Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios provoked by the regime in Athens.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leaders of most opposition parliamentary parties, ministers, heads of the armed forces, representatives of local self-government attended the reception in the presidential palace in the Greek capital, Athens. The leader of the nationalist Greek Decision Kyriakos Velopoulos and the leader of the conservative NIKI party Dimitris Natsios did not come from the parliamentary forces. Both parties are defined as part of the populist right. The leader of the far-right Spartans movement, Dimitris Stingas, was not invited after a court barred his party from June’s European Parliament elections, ruling it was linked to former senior staff of the outlawed far-right Golden Dawn, Ilias Kasidiaris.
Among those invited to the reception were participants in the resistance against the military dictatorship in 1967-1974, victims of the fire in the village of Matti in 2018 that killed more than 100 people, victims of the floods in Thessaly last year, the parents of one of the victims in the railway accident near Larissa at the end of February 2023, volunteers who participated in extinguishing the great fire near Alexandroupolis at the end of the previous summer, as well as representatives of culture, science and sports.