At 47, Costas Karamanlis, nephew of an earlier prime minister, will be Greece's youngest-ever prime minister.
New Democracy has since swung to the right under Costas Karamanlis, its fogeyish young leader.
To speed things up, Mr Karamanlis will head the culture and sports ministry himself.
Mr Karamanlis's other immediate headache is the return of the Olympics to their native soil.
Mr Karamanlis's biggest mistake has been to ignore social reform, in particular of education, health and policing.
George Papandreou, the Socialist opposition leader, has told Mr Karamanlis to resign and call a general election.
EU. But Mr Karamanlis's advisers want to avoid being rushed into an accord that could be unworkable.
Mr Papandreou's promise to be a helpful opposition leader should ease Mr Karamanlis's first few months in office.
Appeals for calm by Costas Karamanlis, the centre-right prime minister, were mostly ignored.
To put things back on track, Mr Karamanlis has decided to take over the culture and sports ministry himself.
Given that many Greeks thrive off that bureaucracy, Mr Karamanlis must be brave as well as a quick learner.
On December 10th a long-planned 24-hour strike by public-sector unions went ahead despite Mr Karamanlis's televised call for it to be cancelled.
Appeals for calm by Costas Karamanlis, the Conservative prime minister, were ignored.
"The government is determined to consolidate the feeling of public safety and to help businesses get back on their feet, " said Mr Karamanlis.
He and Madam Ban visited the new Acropolis Museum, before meeting with the leader of the major opposition, Kostas Karamanlis, at the Hellenic Parliament.
Responding to the unrest, Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis promised on Wednesday to restore order and announced measures to compensate businesses that have suffered.
Mr Karamanlis has picked as his foreign minister Petros Molyviatis, a 75-year-old retired diplomat, who advised his uncle, then prime minister, in the 1970s.
So one of the first tasks faced by Mr Karamanlis will be to convey that awkward and unpleasant truth to his ethnic kin on Cyprus.
Even if Mr Karamanlis rallies New Democracy's various battalions behind him, he has a long way to go before defeating Mr Simitis's steadily self-modernising Socialists.
Mr Karamanlis has picked as his foreign minister Petros Molyviatis, a 75-year-old retired diplomat, who advised his uncle when he was prime minister in the 1970s.
Mr Karamanlis has cruised through two elections and four-and-a-half years in power on the strength of Greece's economic growth, averaging over 4% a year up to 2007.
Some of Mr Karamanlis's contemporaries for example, Dora Bakoyanni, a former culture minister and daughter of the last conservative prime minister, Costas Mitsotakis are jealous of his easy win.
Even before making his victory speech, the new prime minister, 47-year-old Costas Karamanlis, met the chief organiser of the games to discuss how to get delayed Olympic projects completed by August.
In a surprisingly frank speech last week, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis gave a very downbeat assessment of the national economy, saying it was obvious it was not functioning as it should.
New Democracy, a right-of-centre party led by Constantine Karamanlis, an untested young leader (and nephew of the late president of the same name), is still struggling to get his party under control.
Other former leaders of their countries to pass away included Constantine Karamanlis, who was president as Greece restored democracy in 1974, and Todor Zhivkov, who ruled communist Bulgaria for 35 years until 1989.
Politics is a family business in Greece: Costas Karamanlis, the New Democracy leader, is the nephew and namesake of a respected prime minister, and even reformers seem to find that the dynastic factor still counts.
But foreign policy was not the main factor in the Greek election result indeed, when it comes to relations with Cyprus and Turkey, Mr Karamanlis is unlikely to deviate far from the policies of his predecessor.
While Mr Karamanlis is keen to help Turkey along the road to EU membership, he must contend with elderly Greek-Cypriot leaders who doubt whether they can rub along with their Turkish-Cypriot counterparts in a federal state.
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