Hanging It Out in Public

These days the life of recuperating Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, 69, is more Hollywood soap opera than Greek tragedy. His countrymen are regaled almost daily with tattle about his highly public love affair with Olympic Airways flight attendant Dimitra Liani, 34, and contentious divorce from American wife Margaret, 64, after 37 years of marriage. Liani, not Margaret, tended his bedside during recent surgery.

Much of Europe joined in the snickering last week after Papandreou flaunted his ample young mistress at a European Community summit meeting for which he was host on the Greek island of Rhodes. Photos of the enraptured and grandfatherly Prime Minister with a miniskirted Liani were splashed from London to Istanbul, where the Turkish daily Hurriyet called Papandreou an "international laughingstock."

The romantic indiscretion is just one of the recent and largely self- inflicted wounds sustained by Papandreou. A leftist who has dominated Greek politics with a mix of shrewdness and populist passion since taking office in 1981, he may have blown his chance of winning another term when elections are held by next June. Most politically explosive is the so-called Koskotas affair, Greece's biggest postwar banking scandal, which broke in October, just as Papandreou was returning to work after open-heart surgery. It has threatened to implicate two high-ranking government officials and has rocked his ruling Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).

George Koskotas, 34, former chairman of the Bank of Crete and close associate of high-level PASOK officials, is accused of misusing more than $209 million in bank funds. A key question is how Koskotas, not long ago a middle- ranking bank employee, succeeded in building an empire that comprised the bank, five magazines, three newspapers, a radio station and a popular soccer football team. The public also wonders how Koskotas managed to flee Greece while he was under around-the-clock surveillance by an antiterrorist squad. Greeks blame the government for botching the investigation. For his part, Koskotas, who is awaiting extradition from the U.S., has threatened to reveal more high-level wrongdoing. He vows, "I am going to throw them in a frying pan."

Support for PASOK, which won 46% of the vote in the 1985 national election, has plunged to 20% in Athens, half the popularity base of New Democracy, the rightist opposition party. Predicts Gerassimos Arsenis, a former PASOK economic minister: "This is the end of Papandreou. The recent scandals have finally helped to demythicize him."

New Democracy leader Constantine Mitsotakis is confident he will emerge as the next Prime Minister. Unlike Papandreou, who came to power promising to pull out of the European Community and NATO as well as to remove U.S. military bases from Greece, Mitsotakis leans toward the West. "This is going to be the worst situation any Greek Prime Minister has inherited since the end of World War II," says Mitsotakis, noting that his most difficult problem will be to "restore the economy, which is in total disarray." Most observers, though, feel that Greece is fed up with overbearing political parties and personalities on both right and left, and may be headed for what is being called the "Italianization" of Greek politics, a period of coalition governments.

Whoever becomes Prime Minister, Papandreou's era is winding down in an atmosphere of disillusionment. These capers have already cost him the respect of his countrymen and the credibility of his government.