Papandreou fought long, hard battle to the top

ATHENS (Reuters) - He may be the son and grandson of two famous Greek prime ministers but it has been a long, difficult road to the top for George Papandreou, who won Sunday's general election by a landslide.

Along the way, he had to prove his mettle within a socialist PASOK party still nostalgic for his late father Andreas. And it took him three national elections to defeat his arch-rival, outgoing conservative prime minister Costas Karamanlis.

"We stand united, facing the big responsibility to change our country into a nation of justice, solidarity, humanity and green development," Papandreou told cheering supporters after partial results showed his party winning 44 percent of the vote and 160 out of 300 parliament seats.

U.S.-born Papandreou, 57, has worked hard to escape the heavy shadow of his maverick father, the party founder who ruled Greece twice in two decades.

Where the flamboyant Andreas angered Greece's western allies with his political bravado and challenged Greek conventions with his turbulent love life, George, who has served as foreign and education minister, is a calm, discreet politician, comfortable in the European Union's corridors of power in Brussels.

Educated in the United States, Sweden and Canada, Papandreou advocates a "green growth" economic model that respects the environment and invests in renewable energy as the only way out of the crisis for Greece.

"We are a country with great potential," he told Reuters in a recent interview. "We have the political will to make deep changes in a just and equitable way, to put our country back on a development path, to meet the challenges of a new world."

INTERNAL BATTLE

Papandreou was handpicked by then-prime minister Costas Simitis, who secured Greece's euro zone entry, to lead the party in early 2004, partly on the strength of his family name.

Internal party dissent followed an election defeat that year, and he faced a direct challenge after his second defeat to Karamanlis in 2007.

But he won the hard-fought internal battle, proving to friend and foe that he was more than an heir to a dynasty. He picked young, bright talent for top party positions and purged the old guard associated with decades of socialist graft.

Critics have made fun of his mistakes in using the Greek language, his mild manner and even his penchant for riding a bicycle, a far cry from the macho image many Greek politicians strive for.

Taking advantage of New Democracy's declining popularity in the wake of scandals and the economic crisis, he slowly emerged as the favorite to lead the country in opinion polls this year.

An avid technology fan, he has 18,000 friends on Facebook and a website, www.papandreou.gr. His wife Ada is an aeronautical engineer and the couple have a daughter. Papandreou also has a son from a previous marriage.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)