More than thirty small parties contested the October 1993 national elections. Their combined share of the total vote was approximately 1.5 percent, and many of them obtained fewer than 1,000 votes in the entire country--a result typical of post-1974 Greek elections. In general, these small parties are concerned mainly with specific, narrow interests (for example, the Party of Greek Hunters), and they are often geographically limited and ideologically ambivalent.

To the left of the KKE, a number of splinter Marxist, Maoist and anarchist groups have consistently participated in national elections and obtained minuscule support. On the far right, several attempts were made before the mid-1980s to field a viable slate of candidates. In 1974 a projunta grouping obtained 1 percent of the vote. In 1977 the National Front, a coalition of junta supporters, ultraconservatives, and royalists mounted the most serious right-wing challenge of the postjunta years, obtaining nearly 7 percent of the total vote and seating five deputies in the Assembly. In 1981 the Progressive Party, led by Spyros Markezinis, who served in 1973 as prime minister in the junta regime of Georgios Papadopoulos, obtained 2 percent of the vote. Since 1985, however, most of the votes of the far right have gone to ND or PA.

The only noteworthy mainstream minority party of the 1985-94 period was the Democratic Renewal Party, which was formed by Konstantinos Stefanopoulos, a widely respected ND politician and long-time Karamanlis loyalist, when he lost an ND leadership contest to Mitsotakis in 1985. Democratic Renewal never has made a significant impact in national elections, but the one deputy it elected in June 1990 made it possible for Mitsotakis to form a majority government by switching his support to the ND. Democratic Renewal was dissolved after another disappointing showing in the elections for the European Parliament in June 1994. Evert has invited Stefanopoulos back to the ND fold, and he may rejoin that party at some point.

The nascent Green Party has failed to attract significant electoral support. One Green deputy was elected to the Assembly in the 1990 elections, but the movement has been fractious, and the mainstream parties have been quick to pay lip service to environmental causes, thus preempting the development of any mass following for the Greens (see Environmental Policy , ch. 2).

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 Other Parties information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Greece Other Parties should be addressed to the Library of Congress and the CIA.