The slow road to a solid democratic regime
May 31, 1915: Greece was split, with internal borders guarded by French and British forces in the northern Greek town of Katerini. Venizelos had won the elections but the king had forbidden him to take Greece into the war on the side of the Entente. The king dissolved Parliament in May and elections were to take place in September. Venizelos abstained from the elections on the grounds that the dissolution was unconstitutional. With military support from the British and French, he created «a temporary government» in Thessaloniki and, allied with Serbia, which had been invaded by Austria, declared war on the Central Powers. December 16, 1923: The Royalists abstained from the elections and Venizelos’s Liberal Party and other pro-Venizelist parties won 250 out of 398 seats. The composition of the new Parliament worked against Venizelos, leading to his withdrawal again, a series of military interferences in politics and changes to the state. June 9, 1935: The Venizelist movement had been suppressed on March 1 and the Venizelists again abstained from the elections, which Panagis Tsaldaris and Giorgos Kondylis won with 65 percent of the vote. Kondylis overturned Tsaldaris in a coup and brought in the king. Parliament dissolved itself, validating the coup. A referendum voted 97.88 percent in favor of the monarchy. The year 1935 saw an historic changeover between two great 20th century Greek statesmen with the departure of Venizelos and the arrival of Constantine Karamanlis, a young anti-Metaxas deputy from Serres. January 26, 1936: The elections failed to produce a party able to govern in its own right. Parliament – guided by the palace – handed over virtually all power to General Ioannis Metaxas, having first given him a vote of confidence. For the next 10 years there were no elections in Greece. March 31, 1946: The Left abstained from the elections. Not only did the Union of Nationalists win 206 of the 354 seats, but extreme tendencies on both sides were reinforced, with foreign support. Instead of settling their political differences in Parliament, they fought them out in the civil war in some of the ugliest pages in Greek history. November 16, 1952: A derby between Left and Right ended with the latter winning 247 out of 300 seats. Under the 1952 constitution, the king effectively became head of government. Under Alexandros Papagos and Spyros Markezinis, Greece achieved economic stability, but when it raised the issue of Cyprus unsuccessfully in the United Nations, it entered into a headlong confrontation with Britain. May 11, 1958: Having succeeded Papagos, Karamanlis won the 1956 elections, to general surprise. For the first time, the Left became the main opposition party, which upset many, both within Greece and abroad, but not the prime minister, who managed to get along with it till the next elections. But the Cold War system was roused and the palace found the mechanisms to operate alongside and above the legal government. The Center and the Right totally opposed Karamanlis’s attempt to link Greece to the embryonic EEC. Following the 1956 elections, however, Karamanlis did what French President Nicolas Sarkozy is doing now, and absorbed a large number of centrist deputies on whom he based his administrations. October 29, 1961: The most suspect elections in Greek political history, they were held by General Dovas, chief of the Royal Household, and Georgios Papandreou called them the «elections of violence and fraud.» These elections marked the onset of Karamanlis’s full-on clash with the palace when he submitted a draft constitution that would drastically curb the throne’s powers. It would have give the premier, not the king, the right to appoint ministers. If Papandreou had supported that reform, he would have avoided the dispute over ministers that led to his ouster in July 1965. February 16, 1964: Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis had been murdered, and Karamanlis had been beaten by Papandreou on November 3, 1963. Karamanlis came back, lost the elections and left to live in Paris, putting an end to the longest period of political stability the country had known. Upon leaving, Karamanlis again recommended a coalition government – in his absence, to make it easier – and warned of the perils facing democracy in Greece. November 17, 1974: Karamanlis returned to Greece in dramatic circumstances during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. He formed a national unity government and, in the November elections, held on the first anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising against the junta and commenced a three-part endeavor to get the country back on its feet: definite solution of the regime issue, permanent reinstatement of real democracy, and EEC membership. Greece entered a period of unprecedented prosperity and security. October 18, 1981: The «change» promised by PASOK leader Andreas Papandreou came in with a rush, though it did not alter the country’s international alignment as it did not get Greece out of either the EEC or NATO. But it did radically alter the domestic social balance, meeting the expectations of decades and putting people from different levels of society into power. Also, by wrecking public finances and by managing money, mainly from Europe, it paved the way for a new chapter of corruption in Greece. At the same time, it changed the country’s system of values, brought new faces onto the stage and, though by rather dubious means, defused political passions that had been simmering for decades, as well as ushering in the longest-lived administration the country had seen. Since then there have been many elections, but it is still too soon to assess their lasting impact. The most important were the ones that didn’t take place. The May 28, 1967 elections were forestalled (just as Theodoros Pangalos had forestalled the March 24, 1926 elections with his dictatorship), on April 21 when the dictators’ tanks went into the streets, sending Greece back to its worst nightmares. And the elections of February 10, 1974, which were to have given the colonels’ junta a civil cast, ended up in a change of guard that led to the tragic events on Cyprus.
