An EAM-ELAS partisan during the resistance to the Nazi occupation in World War II, under the nom de guerre Yotis, starting as a captain and later being promoted to a major.

During his life he spent 18 years in detention or jail - including being put in internal exile by the Greek colonels in the beginning of the 1967-74 military dictatorship.

First elected to parliament in 1974 after the Metapolitefsi,[2] Florakis led KKE as its general secretary from 1972 until 1989,[1] when, though still fit for the job, he announced his decision to step down from the party's top post and proposed Grigoris Farakos as his successor.

Synaspismos was an attempt to reconcile Greece's two main communist factions, which arose in 1968 out of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring.

Florakis' body lay in state at the KKE headquarters in Perissos on May 24–25 where thousands of party members and sympathisers queued to pay their respects.