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Greek flag flies on windmills along a causeway, Rhodes

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the fall of the military junta dictatorship, in July 1994, afforded Greeks an opportunity to assess their country's progress since that event. Most political observers found that concrete gains had been made and that democracy had been consolidated. Although the political system of Greece still includes serious flaws, the democratic transition of 1974-94 has often been cited for the efficiency with which it has dealt with political problems lingering from the tumultuous past and put in place checks and balances that should resolve future dilemmas.

Foremost among the past problems was the final disposition of the monarchy and the legalization of the communist party. By resolving both of these questions within one year after the junta's fall, Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis removed two of the major deficiencies of the post-World War II political atmosphere that had made the accession of a military dictatorship possible in 1967 (see The Junta , ch. 1). The immediate result of World War II had been the three-year Civil War that left Greece with a stunted parliamentary system characterized by a meddling monarch, pervasive domestic surveillance tactics, and interventionist foreign allies throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

Preparing Greece's political system for long-term stability was a formidable task. After seven years of political isolation ended in 1974, the government of Karamanlis's party, New Democracy (Nea Demokratia--ND), tried to recover the economic momentum that had propelled a rapid political evolution in the late 1950s and made possible the liberal agenda of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou in the mid-1960s. The junta had separated Greece from the successful path being followed by its European neighbors, leaving the capitalist system that emerged from the early 1970s unprepared for the mounting social and political demands that it encountered.

The legalization of all leftist parties and the establishment of a presidential republic cleared the way for consolidation of the new democratic gains. The expanded political spectrum led to vigorous calls for further democratization and modernization, goals most eloquently expressed by Andreas Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Panhellinion Socialistiko Kinima--PASOK). Founded in 1974 from a nucleus of antijunta activists and Papandreou's close personal supporters, PASOK came to power swiftly in 1981, with change as its byword. PASOK's rapid rise confirmed that government power could now pass in orderly fashion from one party to another of quite different ideology.

The PASOK election also began a jarring and controversial era of sociopolitical transformations. Central features of that period were a climate of openness and a palpable sense of political disorientation. PASOK's fiery rhetoric fostered high public expectations that were frustrated by a deepening economic crisis and by PASOK's unfocused long-term political agenda.

To sidestep harsh domestic economic realities in the 1980s, the government used flamboyant diversionary tactics that made Greece appear unstable to its friends and allies. PASOK's first term brought new segments of society, which until that time had not been heard in policy discussions, into the political mainstream. However, by the middle of PASOK's second administration, this process was halted when the state could no longer afford to satisfy mounting interest-group demands. Experts saw PASOK's losses to the conservatives of Karamanlis in 1989, following a period of malaise and scandal, as the death knell of the party. Unhappily, ND failed as badly as had PASOK, so the voters again turned to Papandreou in 1993. But neither ND nor PASOK successes at the polls showed that the political system had evolved beyond a civilized exchange of power between two dominant parties. Obviously, Greek parties had not yet become instruments for popular participation in the increasingly urgent process of reforming and modernizing national institutions--tasks that experts believed a national party must keep central in the electorate's attention.

Data as of December 1994

NOTE: The information regarding Greece on this page is re-published from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Greece Government and Politics information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Greece Government and Politics should be addressed to the Library of Congress and the CIA.