Former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, will serve as a Policy Fellow at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies this spring, the Center announced Tuesday.
“We are pleased to announce that Alexis Tsipras, former Greek PM, who was elected on an anti-austerity platform during the #Eurocrisis, will serve as a CES Policy Fellow this spring,” CES posted on social media platform X.
“We are privileged to host Alexis Tsipras, who as prime minister participated in and witnessed some of the most decisive moments in Europe’s 21st-century history,” said Daniel Ziblatt, director of CES and Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard. “The financial and refugee crises in the first part of this century continue to reverberate in our current moment. Mr Tsipras’ presence on campus will allow us to learn from his experiences in high-level political negotiations contending with those challenges as well as from his efforts to offer an alternative to austerity and to facilitate the historic Prespa Agreement.”
As a Policy Fellow, Tsipras will spend time at both CES on Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge, MA as well as at Harvard’s CHS campus in Washington, DC. He will deliver lectures, engage in discussions with faculty, students, and scholars, and participate in meetings and workshops.
Tsipras, 50, the leader of the left-wing SYRIZA party from 2008 to 2023, served as prime minister from January 2015 to July 2019, in coalition with the right-populist Independent Greeks. In June 2018, his government negotiated the Prespa Agreement with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), ending nearly three decades of bilateral dispute over the name of the country, which Greece considered as appropriating the name of the Greek province and the history and legacy of the Ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia. As a result of the agreement, FYROM changed its name to North Macedonia and Greece lifted its block on the country’s joining NATO, which it did in February 2019.