Dimitris Tsovolas

Dimitris Tsovolas is a leftist politician in Greece who reached the position of Finance minister in PASOK governments during the "dirty" 1980s. He was famously told to loosen the state's purse strings in an election campaign by the then prime minister Andreas Papandreou.

During his tenure at the ministry of finance he presided over a catastrophic and irrational policy of fiscal laxity reminiscent of a "banana republic" rather than a European country. He was eventually removed from that post.

As Greek politics changed, Tsovolas parted ways with a PASOK that started becoming a more professional Social Democratic party rather than the self-styled revolutionary "movement" that it was until then. (echoes of that discarded philosophy based upon ultra leftist politics in combination with nationalism can be found in the present day with Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Circles).

Tsovolas' political philosophy ranges between social conservativism, nationalism, religiosity (although this could be attributed to political expediency), and socialist economics.