Florakis was born on 20 July 1914 in the village of Paliozoglopi, located near Agrafa in the Itamos municipality, in the Karditsa Prefecture, Greece.
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An EAM-ELAS partisan during the resistance to the Nazi occupation in World War II, Florakis was on the losing side of the Greek Civil War that followed the liberation of the country, and subsequently left the country.
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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.