Containing COVID-19: Greece’s successes and challenges ahead

Kyriakos Mitsotakis was sworn in as prime minister of the Hellenic Republic on July 8, 2019. President of Nea Demokratia since January 2016, Mitsotakis managed to modernize his party, renew and boost its membership base, create a system of funding based on small annual donations by the members, and put in place a code of transparency and accountability in the operations of the party.

He led his party to a landslide victory three years later, campaigning on a platform for jobs, strong growth, and lower taxes. Nea Demokratia was the first party to win an absolute majority in the Greek Parliament since 2009. As minister of administrative reform and e-Government from June 2013 until January 2015, he spearheaded comprehensive national reforms by implementing a functional reorganization of institutions, structures, and processes.

James Ryan serves as the ninth president of the University of Virginia. A leading expert on law and education, Ryan has written extensively about the ways in which law structures educational opportunity. His articles and essays address such topics as school desegregation, school finance, school choice, standards and testing, pre-K, and the intersection of special education and neuroscience. Ryan is also the coauthor of the textbook Educational Policy and the Law and the author of Five Miles Away, A World Apart, which was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. Ryan’s most recent book, Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions, based on his popular 2016 Commencement speech, was published in 2017 by HarperOne and is a New York Times bestseller.

John R. Allen is the president of the Brookings Institution. A retired U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and former commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Allen served in two senior diplomatic roles following his retirement from the Marine Corps. First, for 15 months as senior advisor to the secretary of defense on Middle East Security, during which he led the security dialogue for the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. President Barack Obama then appointed Allen as special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, a position he held for 15 months.

William Antholis serves as director and CEO of UVA's Miller Center, which studies the American presidency, public policy, and democratic institutions. He also has served in the U.S. federal government at the White House National Security Council and National Economic Council, and at the State Department. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global and, with Strobe Talbot, Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming.

Amanda Sloat is a Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. She is also a fellow with the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her areas of expertise include Brexit and British politics, Turkey and Southern Europe, the European Union, and trans-Atlantic relations.