ATHENS – Movement for Change (KINAL) leader Fofi Gennimata paid tribute to her father, Giorgos Gennimatas, an experienced and popular politician responsible for establishing the National Health System as a Health Minister, on the 27th anniversary of his death.

Gennimatas, who died of cancer in 1994, was a founding and leading member of PASOK and a civil engineer by training. His contribution to the health system of Greece, which was set up in 1983 by a law he introduced, is reflected in the naming of the General State Hospital after him.

In a message on social networks, his daughter said that "society always showered you with its love and trust during your life – you were a reformer, socialist and patriot."

Gennimata also recalled her father's messages of the need for "national strategy, national solidarity at its base and national collaboration at its top, a strategy that goes beyond parties and the length of a government's life. The target was peace, securing the borders, incorporating Cyprus in the community, and establishing a common European security system."

What concerned him then is still valid today, she added. "At times of fear for life, great inequalities, restrictions in rights and freedoms, during manufactured tension, we as a democratic party place humans and our homeland at the center of our choices," she noted.