About a month ago, Nepheli Hatzioannidu received an unexpected phone call. It was from Maximos. “I was informed that the Prime Minister wants to see me,” says “K”. She thought the meeting would focus on Wonder Women, an online communication platform for women she founded in 2019. But she was wrong. What did he want to know Kyriakos Mitsotakis it was about whether she would be interested in going into politics.

“I was shocked,” refers to “K”, stressing that until that moment he had not thought of becoming a politician. “I have laid out all my concerns. And the prime minister replied that he wanted me to do what I do, only from a different role. But what exactly does Mrs. Hatzioannidu do? When the prime minister presented her ballot on statehood New Republic Last week, many were surprised by the name he chose for the sixth – elected – position. Ms. Hatzioannidu was known to those who followed her “Wonderful Women” –190,000 in Instagram– but for many it remains a question mark. So who is the 31-year-old New Democracy candidate?

She was born and raised in Thessaloniki, where she lives with her family – her husband and two daughters aged 5 years and 18 months. When she was a student, she says her dream was to work in social advertising. He eventually studied finance and management at Bocconi University in Milan. After receiving her diploma in 2013, due to family reasons, she returned to Thessaloniki. He found a job in an advertising company, where he first came into contact with the digital part. “But I didn’t like the advertising field, and I started attending all the workshops on skills and entrepreneurship,” says “K”.

One of them was dedicated to social entrepreneurship. During the break, he met three girls. A conversation with them turned into Code It Like a Girl, a social enterprise they co-founded to increase female representation in technology industries. “It was the first time I participated in women’s empowerment.” says “K”. Although “Code It Like a Girl” has collaborated with Google and Microsoft Hellas, among others, “we didn’t manage to develop it,” he says.

He stayed in advertising and decided to pursue a master’s degree in social innovation and social entrepreneurship. When the migrant crisis began in Greece, she began to volunteer in projects related to migration, especially with women, and at the same time began to participate in counseling sessions both as a mentor – “opening and closing a social enterprise in Greece” – and in as a mentor she participated in many European seminars on women’s empowerment. She began freelancing in digital advertising and became pregnant with her first daughter in 2017.

A few months later, he opened a restaurant business on the Thessaloniki campus. It was in this cafeteria that a young working mother with a 6-month-old baby came up with the idea for Wonder Women.

“I have observed the women around me who have taken on everyday life with such courage,” says Ms. Hatzioannidu. “They openly spoke to me about motherhood, about the difficulties – I thought that we should read the exploits of ordinary women, we should learn that the women around us are beautiful, because they survive in every role that they are given,” she emphasizes.

“Issues that concern not only women, but all citizens, that is, those who want to live with dignity, are non-partisan.”

She created an online platform with anonymous dedications to women and an anonymous Instagram profile. “The first night we received 300 initiations from women to other women,” she reports. She posted them daily on Instagram – six months later, the profile had 10,000 subscribers. Soon, and before the Greek #MeToo, he started getting messages from women about other issues — from abuse to infertility — that they wanted to discuss, but there was no place on the Internet for that, he notes.

During the year of the page’s existence, its real name was published. Meanwhile, the pandemic came and the Great Ones’ first action—they raised money for gloves—as well as the urgent need for an online community. And then there was #MeToo.

“The profile changed instantly,” says Ms. Chazioannidou. She began to receive countless messages from women who did not know where to report their past abuse and from others who did not know where or how to report or how to find help.

“I used to call the General Secretariat for Family Policy and Gender Equality and ask where a girl who needs legal, psychological support can go,” she says. She began to see which bills were about women and shared them on the page along with other news. “As a platform, we started to play an informational role because I realized that information often does not reach everyone or is not clearly visible,” says Ms. Hatzioannidu.

At the same time, having closed the restaurant business due to the pandemic, she worked as a private worker, and in 2021 gave birth to her second daughter. That same year, Wonder Women became a non-profit organization. Last year and this year, she participated in two missions to the European Parliament – “there I understood how things are at the European level, how policies are being built to eliminate a phenomenon that directly affects women,” she says.

However, the “Wonderful” profile was not only about abuse or issues that affect only women, but all social groups and rights in general – “a safe online space where everyone can talk about what worries them,” explains He. .

“Issues that concern not only women, but all citizens, that is, those who want to live with dignity, are supra-partisan,” he says, “they concern all of us.” “When they tell you, ‘We’ve seen you do some things and we’re interested in how you approach them,’ I think it’s wrong to say no, I won’t do it,” he says.

She considers the prime minister’s offer an honor, and her only plan for the future is to keep working for what she believes in, what she faces, just like she did a week ago, acknowledging that now the responsibility is “enormous.” “All I’m Waiting For” says Ms. Chatziioannidou in “K”“do meaningful work.”