The wife of Vasilis Leventis, Natasa Mendesidou, spoke to Sasa Stamati in a deeply moving interview about the sudden loss of the Union of Centrists party leader. “We only just found out ourselves. He had been hospitalized for two months, he was in intensive care with a tracheostomy during the last week, his condition had deteriorated, and he passed away a short while ago. I don’t know much — the doctor came to us from the ICU and told us that Vasilis had taken a turn for the worse, and we were finding out at the same moment the news was breaking.”
Read more: Vasilis Leventis passes away at the age of 75
She continued, speaking tenderly about her beloved husband. “Oh, what can I say about Vasilis — anything I say will never be enough. The kindness of his soul was something very few people possess. He loved my son, he loved his grandchildren, and they loved him back — they called him father and grandfather. He must have left this world fulfilled,” concluded Natasa Mendesidou.
Vasilis Leventis passes away: His son’s tribute
Following the passing of Vasilis Leventis, Marios Georgiadis shared the following heartfelt message on social media:
“I never expected this moment to come so soon. Just at 75. Today, with great pain, I say goodbye to my father. The man who raised me, who supported me at every step of my life, and who taught me — by example — what dignity, perseverance, patience, consistency, and courage truly mean.
For many, you were the President. For me, you were simply my father. I was not your biological child. Yet you never once made me feel like I was anything less than your son. And today, looking back on an entire lifetime, I realize that blood may create kinship — but love, care, and presence are what make a father.
And you were my father. Thank you for raising me as your own. Thank you for everything you taught me — not just through your words, but through the way you lived. Your greatest legacy is not what you achieved. It is the way you lived. The way you fought. The way you stayed true to your principles.
Farewell, father.
I will never forget you“.
Who was Vasilis Leventis
Vasilis Leventis was born in Messini, Greece. He was the fourth child of Apostolos and Gregoria Leventis, who were originally from Korakovuni in Arcadia, while their own parents came from Drymonas on the island of Kythira. After the family’s property was destroyed by German occupying forces during World War II, the Leventis family relocated to Piraeus, where Vasilis completed his primary and secondary education.
In 1969, he was admitted to the National Technical University of Athens (Polytechnic) — ranking ninth in his entry class — in the Department of Civil Engineering. He graduated with distinction and went on to pursue postgraduate studies in Munich, Germany. He completed his military service in the Hellenic Navy, serving at the Naval Base of Salamis in the Directorate of Naval Administrative Support, with the rank of Ensign, from 1976 to 1978.
During the anti-dictatorship movement (1970–1974), while Leventis was a student at the Polytechnic, he operated a mimeograph machine and, together with a group of fellow students, distributed leaflets calling on Athenians to rise up against the military junta. His first substantive engagement with politics came in 1975, when, as an associate of former Polytechnic Rector Cyprianus Biris, he contributed to the drafting of Articles 21 and 24 of the Greek Constitution and to the creation of the DEPOS urban planning programme.
A life in politics
He first became actively involved in politics in 1974 as a founding member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). After 1981, he voiced strong disagreements, taking the position that the party — after forming a majority government — was gradually abandoning its founding principles and, in practice, continuing the policies of its predecessors. In 1982, he stood as a candidate for Mayor of Piraeus.
In 1984, he founded the first ecology party in Greece, and his electoral coalition — titled “Eleftheroi” (The Free) — participated in that year’s European Parliament elections, receiving 8,816 votes and a 0.15% share. In 1986, he ran for Mayor of Athens, receiving 2,352 votes (0.57%). In the parliamentary elections of June 1989, he stood as a candidate on the New Democracy party ticket in Athens B’ constituency, but with 5,212 preference votes he ranked 29th out of 31 candidates and was not elected.
In early 1990, he founded the party Ecologists Pacifists Greens, with which he participated in that year’s parliamentary elections. Later that same year, he established the television channel Kanali 67.
The Union of Centrists
In 1992, he collaborated with Giorgos G. Papandreou’s Democratic Party Centre to create the Union of Centrists and Ecologists — later known simply as the Union of Centrists. The party’s name was chosen as a deliberate reference to the Centre Union, which had been founded and led by Georgios Papandreou. The phrase “and Ecologists” was included in the original name but was later dropped. The party’s founding aim was to provide a centrist political home for PASOK’s traditional social base, which Leventis believed had been betrayed by the movement’s ideological transformation over the years.
Leventis first came to wider public attention through his participation in the by-elections held on 5 April 1992 in the Athens B’ constituency. Although he was not elected to parliament, he received more than 100,000 votes (114,942) — a figure far exceeding the Union of Centrists’ established electoral strength in the constituency.
The Union of Centrists went on to participate in every parliamentary and European Parliament election from 1993 onwards. That same year, Kanali 67 was renamed Kanali 40, and at the end of 2000 it was sold to publisher Giorgos Kouris, who rebranded it as Extra Channel on 8 January of the following year. It subsequently passed into the ownership of Filippos Vryonis and was renamed Extra 3 in August 2003.
From 2000 onwards, Leventis hosted a weekly political programme on the channel titled Political Marathon. In more recent years, he continued broadcasting through the Union of Centrists’ official YouTube channel, under the name Antidiaploki TV. He was a regular columnist for the newspaper Avriani, and was frequently invited by regional television journalists for interviews and political commentary. Since 2004, he distributed the party’s official newspaper, Antidiaploki. He was also the author of two books — collections of his published articles in Avriani — titled Publishers and Journalists: The Great Wounds of Greek Society and Opening the Archive of Vasilis Leventis.
Leventis had proposed Lucas Papademos for the position of Prime Minister in a coalition government as early as June 2011 — months before the formal mandate to form a government was granted on 10 November 2011 — at a time when the Greek political system had reached an impasse in managing the country during the economic crisis. He continued to express his esteem for Papademos and maintained that the Papademos Government operated under suffocating political constraints imposed by the parties that supported it, arguing it could have achieved far more had it been given greater freedom to govern.
The January 2015 parliamentary elections
In the January 2015 parliamentary elections, Leventis’ party received 5.11% in the Thessaloniki A’ constituency — one percentage point ahead of PASOK (4.12%) and approximately four points ahead of KIDISO (1.33%) — while nationally the Union of Centrists secured 1.79%, with 110,826 citizens casting their vote for the party. This represented a dramatic improvement from the June 2012 elections, where it had received just 0.28%.
In the September 2015 parliamentary elections, the Union of Centrists successfully entered parliament — as did Leventis himself — 23 years after the party’s founding, receiving 3.43% of the vote and electing 9 MPs.
In the July 2019 parliamentary elections, the Union of Centrists received 1.24%, falling short of the parliamentary threshold. Vasilis Leventis was not re-elected.
His health battle
On 25 September 2021, it became known that Leventis had contracted COVID-19 and had been placed on a ventilator in the intensive care unit of Evangelismos Hospital in Athens. He was taken off the ventilator on 28 September, but was reintubated the following day. On 19 October, he was extubated again, but in the days that followed his condition deteriorated and he was readmitted to the ICU. On 15 November, he was extubated for a third time due to improvement in his condition. Two days later — on 17 November — he was transferred out of the ICU and moved to a regular hospital room. His physical condition had been significantly weakened, and, as his brother noted, he had lost a considerable amount of weight. On 9 December 2021, he was discharged from hospital after 75 days of treatment.
