What is "pasok"

The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (, ), known mostly by its acronym PASOK (, ), is a social-democratic political party in Greece and one of the country's major electoral forces between 1977 and 2012 elections, after the 1967-74 Military Dictatorship.

It was founded on 3 September 1974 by Andreas Papandreou as a democratic socialist and left-wing nationalist party. As a result of the 1981 legislative election, PASOK became Greece's first left-of-centre party to win a majority in the Hellenic Parliament.

Formerly one of the two major parties in Greek politics, it has lost much of its popular support as a result of the Greek debt crisis. When the crisis started PASOK was the ruling party with George Papandreou as Prime Minister and he was responsible for negotiating the First Greek bailout package with the European troika. The party was a part of two coalition governments from 2011 to 2015 during which unprecedented austerity measures were taken in response to the crisis. In the Hellenic Parliament PASOK went from being the largest party with 160 mandates (43.92% of the popular vote) in the 2009 election to being the smallest party with 13 mandates (4.7% of the popular vote) in the January 2015 election, which later rose, due to an alliance with DIMAR, to 17 mandates (6.3% of the popular vote) in the September 2015 election.