‘There is a realization that you can’t do much on your own.’


ATHENS - Newly elected and facing a huge budget deficit, Gree k Prime Minister George Papandreou arrived in Brussels for his first meeting with European leaders last December with few options.

He might have tried to play for time. Instead, he told them everything. Not only was the Greek deficit twice as high as previously reported, but his country’s finances were also a mess. Corruption was pervasive. Tax evasion, rampant.

“I said, listen, let’s not, you know, beat around the bush,” Mr. Papandreou recently recalled. “This is a problem. I will tell you what my view is and what I am trying to do.”

Improbably, perhaps, his strategy worked. Within months, he had managed to secure the bailout he needed while still maintaining good relations with his fellow European leaders .

“There is a lot of tension among the players at the E.U. right now,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate economist . “Another personality, and that tension would have blown.”

Perhaps even more improbably, Mr. Papandreou’s strategy of telling it like it is has worked out for him at home, too. Despite imposing a series of harsh cutbacks , he remains popular with voters .

Greek leaders have tended to be flamboyant and uncompromising, with a penchant for nationalistic rhetoric and a love of perks. Mr. Papandreou, though a scion of a pedigreed socialist political clan, has broken the mold. At times, he talks so quietly - whether in the English he speaks with a California twang or in his other three languages - that it is hard to hear him.

He had barely taken office when he gave up his predecessor’s luxury BMW and plucked a used Toyota Prius from the state motor pool as his official car. Then he told his ministers to downsize, too.

Such concessions helped persuade Germany, the most reluctant of the big European countries, to back a rescue package for Greece .

At the height of the crisis in the spring, Mr. Papandreou brought the International Monetary Fund into negotiations. Some considered that an implicit challenge to Europe’s ability to sort out its own financial affairs, but it also served as a wakeup call that Greece needed the region’s collective help.

No one seems more eager for reform than Mr. Papandreou himself. Though the Papandreou family has the political resonance in Greece of the Kennedys in the United States, Mr. Papandreou is American-born and -educated. He has stubbornly pursued the prime minister’s office for much of the decade, despite being rejected twice by Greek voters.

This time, he ran an Obama-like campaign promising change and transparency. He hits his stride talking about how globalization has affected decision making. “People are much more aware of the common problems,” he said. “But at the same time, there is the realization that you can’t do much on your own.”

He now faces the tasks of dismantling the sprawling Greek welfare system that his father, Andreas, helped erect when he was prime minister in the 1980s. He concedes that the austerity measures could push Greece into a depression.

Meanwhile, strikes and protests continue and, in recent weeks, criticism has been mounting over the performance of his ministers.

Opponents have sometimes ridiculed Mr. Papandreou for stumbling in the use of the Greek language ? a subject that clearly annoys him. But aides say he shows a deep understanding of his homeland - and an uncanny knack for navigating its politics.

“He is political to his fingertips,” said Richard Parker, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has known the family since he was a graduate student working for Mr. Papandreou’s father. “He got that from his father.”


By SUZANNE DALEY