Athens - Former finance minister Antonis Samaras was elected Greece's Conservative opposition party leader, results showed Monday. Samaras, 58, who succeeded former prime minister Costas Karamanlis defeated former foreign minister Dora Bakoyianni and Thessaloniki prefecture head Panayiotis Psomiadis in a ballot Sunday in which all 400,000 New Democracy party members voted.
The conservative New Democracy party lost power to the Socialist PASOk party in national elections on October 4.
Samaras' win is considered a remarkable feat for a politician which left New Democracy in 1993 to form his own short-lived party, Political Spring. He was later held responsible for costing the conservatives that year's election which brought the Socialists to power.
He is American-educated, earning a bachelor's degree from Amherst College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Samaras was elected to parliament in 1977 and became finance minister in 1989 and foreign minister in 1990.
After years of relative isolation, Karamanlis offered him a seat in the European Parliament in 2004 under the conservative ticket. In 2007 he returned to the Greek Parliament and was made culture minister in 2008.
