Stefanos Manos

Stefanos Manos was born in Athens on 20 December 1939. His father, Alexandros Manos, was a surgeon and a former director of Evangelismos Hospital in Athens. His mother, Marietta Panoutsou, was a businesswoman and the daughter of Kosmas Panoutsos, a former president of the Federation of Greek Industries, whose family had acquired the historic Allatini industrial company in Thessaloniki.

He studied mechanical engineering, specialising in aerodynamics, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, graduating in 1963, and in 1965 he received an MBA from Harvard University.

The following year he became assistant general manager of Allatini, and he went on to serve as its general manager, vice chairman and chairman. At the company's biscuit business in Chalkida he introduced retail packs made of plastic coated paper in 1966, replacing the metal tins then common in Greece, and in 1968 he brought all-purpose flour to the Greek market, an idea he took from the United States. He was also vice president of the Greek flour millers' association and served on the board of the Federation of Greek Industries. He left Allatini in 1977 when he was elected to parliament.

Manos was elected to the Hellenic Parliament for New Democracy in the Athens A constituency in 1977, and he was returned at every election until 2007 except those of 1981 and June 1989.

From 1977 to 1980 he was deputy minister of public works. He then became the first minister of the new Ministry of Spatial Planning, Housing and Environment, and also minister of industry and energy, in the government of Georgios Rallis from 1980 to 1981. In the government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis he was minister for the environment, physical planning and public works from 1990, minister of national economy in 1992 and minister of finance from 1992 to 1993.

His record as a minister included the protection of about 400 traditional settlements, the first pedestrianised streets in Athens, the regeneration of the Plaka district after he banned its nightclubs, bus lanes in the city centre, strict environmental rules and fines for polluting industries, and the relocation of the Athens gasworks. His Capital 2000 plan of 1979 set out the studies and land acquisition for what became the Athens Metro, the airport at Spata and the Attiki Odos motorway, and in the early 1990s he moved those projects forward, along with the Rio-Antirrio bridge, the introduction of mobile telephony and the opening up of the electricity and telephone monopolies.

Manos argued throughout his career for a smaller state, more enterprise and economic and institutional reform, and he was an early and unpopular champion of privatisation. As finance minister he famously remarked in 1992 that it would be cheaper for Greece to send every rail passenger to their destination by taxi, a line later quoted by Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang. His decision that August to raise the excise duty on petrol by 50 drachmas a litre was widely criticised.

In 1998 he broke with the New Democracy leader Kostas Karamanlis over a vote on public utilities and was expelled from the party. In April 1999 he founded The Liberals, which won 1.62 per cent at that year's European elections. He returned to parliament in 2000 on the New Democracy ticket, suspended the party in 2002 for lack of funds, and in 2004 was elected as an independent in third place on the PASOK state list under George Papandreou.

On 17 March 2009 he co-founded a new liberal party, Drassi, with Vasilis Kontogiannopoulos and Yiannis Boutaris, and headed its list at the 2009 European elections. Drassi ran jointly with Recreate Greece in the 2012 elections, and after it failed to enter parliament he stepped down as leader on 19 June 2012 while remaining an active member. Until his death he wrote regularly for the newspaper Kathimerini and the online newspaper Liberal.

Manos was married to Kirsten Manou, and they had five children: Alexandros, Konstantinos, Filippos, Marietti and Ioanna.

He wrote the book Antistrouthokamilika, published by Kathimerini in 2010, and contributed to several collective works on Greek reform, including a 2016 volume proposing a new constitution for Greece. He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the President of France. A biography by the journalist Aris Portosalte, Stefanos Manos: A Break with Inertia, was published in 2022.

In 2010 he was seriously ill with pneumonia caused by H1N1 flu, from which he recovered.

Manos had suffered from lung problems since 2022. He died on Saturday 15 August 2026, the feast of the Dormition, aged 86. Kathimerini reported his death that morning.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said he had learned of the death with sadness, recalled knowing Manos as a close associate of his father and a minister in his government, and described him as an unconventional politician with modern and decisive positions that were often ahead of their time. He singled out the arrival of mobile telephony, the contracts for the Metro and the Rio-Antirrio bridge, and the pedestrianisation and protection of traditional settlements.

His funeral was held at Kefalari in Kifisia on 20 August 2026. It was attended by family and friends and by figures including the Speaker of Parliament Nikitas Kaklamanis, Deputy Prime Minister Kostis Hatzidakis, Minister of State Akis Skertsos and Interior Minister Theodoros Livanios.

Manos is remembered as one of the most consistent liberal voices in modern Greek politics, a reformer who argued for privatisation, fiscal discipline and a smaller state long before these ideas were mainstream, and who was willing to break with party leaders to defend them. His work as a planning and environment minister left a visible mark on Athens, from the pedestrian streets and bus lanes of the centre to the restored Plaka, and on the major infrastructure projects that shaped the country in the following decades. His critics argued that his refusal to weigh political cost often left him isolated.