Dimitris Skoulos, a fashion photographer and TV personality, will run for parliament with the ruling New Democracy party in the 2027 general election.
The party’s press office said Prime Minister and leader of New Democracy Kyriakos Mitsotakis, had decided to place Skoulos on the ticket in Piraeus B, one of two electoral districts covering the port city of Piraeus and its surrounding suburbs.
The official announcement confirmed news that Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis, one of the government’s most combative figures, had already made public. Speaking to supporters at a cafe in Nea Ionia at the end of September Georgiadis closed his remarks by welcoming Skoulos to the party’s Piraeus ballot and revealing that the photographer is also his tennis partner. “Unfortunately, I’ll admit it publicly: he even beats me,” Georgiadis told the crowd. “Dimitris, good luck! You’ve made us very happy.”
From Fashion Shoots to Reality TV
According to the party’s announcement, Skoulos has worked continuously as a fashion photographer and visual artist for three decades, in Greece and abroad, with work published in 25 countries spanning both commercial fashion and fine art photography.
He studied business administration and economics in Patras, in western Greece, but chose to pursue photography instead and has worked exclusively as a freelancer since the early 1990s, on editorial projects, brand collaborations and his own artistic work.
His wider public profile, however, comes from television. Skoulos sat on the judging panel of “Greece’s Next Top Model” for four seasons, from 2018 to 2021, and was a judge on the fashion reality show “My Style Rocks.” More recently, he moved from the judges’ table to the stage, finishing second as a contestant on the singing competition “Just the 2 of Us.”
A Familiar Playbook
Celebrity recruits are a fixture of Greek elections. In a system where voters cast preference votes for individual candidates on a party’s list, a famous name gives a newcomer a head start over lesser known running mates.
The May 2023 election was a case in point, with actors, models, singers, athletes and, above all, journalists spread across party ballots.
New Democracy fielded Giourkas Seitaridis, the right back on the national team that won the Euro 2004 championship in Portugal, who went on to play for Panathinaikos, Porto, Dynamo Moscow and Atletico Madrid. In Piraeus A, it ran Noni Dounia, a former actress, TV presenter and model first elected to parliament in 2019.
The opposition was no different. The leftist SYRIZA party placed novelist and screenwriter Elena Akrita and veteran news anchor Popi Tsapanidou on its state list, a nationwide slate whose candidates are elected according to their ranking rather than by preference vote. The socialist PASOK gave an honorary spot on its own state list to Nikos Sarganis, a former Olympiacos and Panathinaikos goalkeeper with 58 caps for Greece. The Communist Party of Greece fielded several well known actors, while former national team midfielder Vasilis Tsiartas, another Euro 2004 winner, headed the state list of the small National Creation party.
Skoulos now joins that tradition, with the 2027 vote still to come.
