A changing of the guard: Karolos Papoulias steps into the country’s presidential limelight

Former foreign minister follows Costis Stephanopoulos and a line of earlier incumbents into a mainly honorary but still key post

Former president of Greece Costis Stephanopoulos (l) with his successor, Karolos Papoulias, at last Saturday’s changeover ceremony, as an evzone looks on. Papoulias, 76, will serve a five-year term, renewable once.

By John Ross - Kathimerini English Edition

It may be mainly ceremonial nowadays, but Greece’s presidential apparatus still draws the nation’s rapt attention whenever a new page turns. Sometimes this happens just once a decade, as with last Saturday, when a visibly moved Karolos Papoulias took over from Costis Stephanopoulos, becoming post-dictatorship Greece’s sixth head of state. In doing so, he steps into a surprisingly well-established tradition for such a relatively young institution, and a surprisingly benign feature of such an historically fractious polity.

If the Greek presidency is nowadays almost universally respected in its strictly circumscribed role, much of that is due to Stephanopoulos, who was as widely admired during his two five-year terms for his simple lifestyle and tastes as for his occasionally tough but well-chosen words. The office having been stripped, in the 1980s, of most of its meaty political powers, it is increasingly defined by personal elements; in this case, the man (or in the future, surely, the woman) really does maketh the office.

Constantine Karamanlis, who held the office on two separate occasions, between 1980 and 1995, was similarly revered for his simple, even austere tastes and tendency toward aloofness despite a long career in politics, that most clubby of professions. To be a man of the people, the man has to be well apart from the people, apparently, as many a leader has discovered. Holding such an office can be a pretty lonely affair.

Papoulias’s longtime association with the more imaginative elements of the Papandreou years, as deputy foreign minister and then foreign minister, were apparently not held against him (nor did Stephanopoulos’s lackluster former political career prevent his presidential rise). In a country where lifetime political grudges are not unknown, this may seem surprising, but it also attests to the job’s essentially apolitical role, crowning rather than launching a career. After all, it was the conservative New Democracy party that engineered the Papoulias choice; until now, ruling parties plumped for their own. This was an example of greater cross-party cooperation, but also a shrewd case of stealing some of the opposition’s thunder.

The only controversy affecting the ceremony was aimed at the one conducting it, Archbishop Christodoulos.

The shift to the Papoulias era was so easy, so friction-free, that it is almost hard to comprehend — especially for younger observers of the Greek scene — how fiendishly controversial the role of head of state has been in modern Greek life. For most of its history, apart from a republican interlude in the 1920s and 1930s, Greece was an often-troubled monarchy, until the 1967-74 dictatorship and ensuing referendum quickly ended, once and for all, royal Greece and brought in the republic of today. It is largely thanks to Papoulias’s five predecessors since 1974 that the role of head of state has gone from being the single most controversial element of the Greek political system to being its single least controversial element — and all in a mere generation.

Much has also changed from 20 years ago, when the presidency was seen as the system’s pivot, without which, it was widely feared, the Greek political system would lurch out of balance. The early post-junta presidents helped pave the road to normality. Few Greeks (much less philhellenes) could pull their names from memory: General Phaidon Gizikis (a transitional figure) and Michalis Stassinopoulos each served extremely brief terms, while Constantine Tsatsos served a very low-key five years.

This all changed following the election in 1980 of Constantine Karamanlis, formerly the prime minister, followed a year later by the sweeping PASOK victory under Andreas Papandreou. The two coexisted uneasily, yet oddly reassuringly, during both men’s first terms. Karamanlis’s putative balancing role was upended when the latter, in March 1985, suddenly declared support for Christos Sartzetakis, a judge, and engineered reforms demoting the presidency to figurehead status. Miffed and sniffing, inevitability Karamanlis resigned.

Sartzetakis carried unshakable ethical standing but ended up being too passive in the role for many; Papandreou even toyed with the idea of replacing him. Yet this office “demotion” came off without fomenting a wider crisis while reaffirming parliamentarism, and the new circumstances mainly required new individual approaches. Karamanlis came back for a final, extended bow on the national stage (1990-95), followed by Stephanopoulos.

What sort of president will Papoulias turn out to be? That’s pure speculation at this point, but much will depend on his willingness to speak out on difficult issues. What is not likely to define his success are the issues themselves, at least in a way that, say, a Schroeder chancellorship or a Bush presidency is shaped largely by external forces. In this (Greek) case, it is his own inner compass, and his expression of it (homilies or hard-hitting language?) that will determine his impact. For better or worse, he is now expected to be a sort of modern-day philosopher and elder statesman for the nation — albeit one who’s not elected by them, but by Parliament. The pressures are very different from those facing the prime minister and his Cabinet, but they are still real enough.

In many ways, the evolution of the modern Greek presidency has loosely mirrored what happened in the two other Mediterranean states that emerged from dictatorships in the mid-1970s. In all three cases, strong, independent executives subsequently ebbed in importance. King Juan Carlos became, early on, a backer of the fledgling Spanish democracy, and crucially faced down a would-be military coup — complete with wild-eyed, gun-waving civil guards led by Antonio Tejero, who barged into an astonished Parliament in 1981, holding it hostage for 18 hours before giving up — paving the way for a normalization of politics in a way that Greece was mercifully spared.

And in Portugal, a powerful presidency, long held by Mario Soares, has given way to a normal parliamentary system; Greece, too, was spared Portugal’s temporary lurch to the extreme left after 1974. There are other models too; in some ways the Greek presidency now resembles the German one, rather than the more powerful French one that Karamanlis preferred to model himself after. But unique it is not, at least not any longer.

Despite the honorary nature of the job, one peculiar and potentially troubling anomaly does, however, remain. Even now, the election of a president could still trigger a political crisis and early parliamentary elections if no one can muster the minimum of 200 votes out of the 300-seat Parliament. Cross-party cooperation is needed to settle on an incumbent, but the two-thirds rule (three-fifths on the third ballot) is an example of good intentions that can go awry. In this case, George Papandreou, PASOK’s leader, and Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis sensibly agreed to support Papoulias (reputedly far down the original list of possibilities), staving off any crisis.

How ironic it would be if a position that, after decades of head-of-state tumult, is now set up to be uncontroversial, instead became the source of future disputes between factions or parties. Much still depends on those who are filling the shoes rather than the one wearing them.