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Former Minister of the Interior in the two governments of New Democracy in the period 2004-2009 Prokopis Pavlopoulos is the candidate for president of Greece nominated by the ruling coalition.

After long internal party disputes, Alexis Tsipras announced the nomination of Pavlopoulos before the members of the parliamentary group of the radical left, stressing that it was fully supported by his coalition partner and leader of Independent Greeks Panos Kammenos.

Alexis Tsipras defended the decision to nominate Prokopis Pavlopoulos president with the words, "We are living in an era when we need our people to be united more than ever. Not only at the level of society, but also in politics and institutions."

He explained that he had carefully listened to the proposals to nominate a leftist politician and defined them as logical, since Greece had never had a leftist president. Then he added that, in difficult times for the country, the left wing had never been arrogant to history and that its strength was in the fact that it had never wanted to occupy the high posts.

"Today we need a president with proven democratic consciousness, who is well accepted by society and the Greek Parliament," said the Greek Prime Minister.

According to commentators, the fact that Prokopis Pavlopoulos had voted against the first memorandum of financial aid to Greece and had subsequently opposed many of the related policies of Antonis Samaras government was in favour of his nomination. He is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Athens by occupation and has a good reputation among his colleagues and former students. He is part of the group of MPs united around Kostas Karamanlis and in the latest elections, he did not run for a MP for the first time after 1996.

An interesting fact in the biography of Prokopis Pavlopoulos is that in 1974 he was secretary of the first Greek president after the overthrow of the military junta, Michail Stasinopoulos. In the period 1989-1990, he was speaker of the national unity government of Prime Minister Xenophon Zolotas.

The vote in the Greek Parliament will take place on Wednesday, 18 February. In order for Prokopis Pavlopoulos to be elected a president, he must receive the votes of 180 MPs from the 300-seat Greek cabinet.