Fifty-four and a half per cent of the total vote is indeed an enviable performance and, under the electoral system agreed upon by the parties involved, it gives the New Democracy party a total of 220 seats in the 300-man parliament.
The chief opposition party is the Centre Union-New Forces grouping led by George Mavros. This party had been expected to do better than the 20.4 percent it finally obtained. Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement won 13.6 percent of the vote and the United Left, consisting of the Greek Communist Party (internal and external) and the United Democratic Left (EDA), which had acted as a cover for the Communist Party during its long years of illegality, polled a bare 9.3 per cent of the total vote. The extreme right-wing party of Petros Garoufalias, the only party leader to declare himself in favour of the monarchy, managed to capture only 1.2 per cent.
In analysing these results, most observers agree that after the trauma of a seven-year dictatorship and a near-war with Turkey, the people decided to put their political convictions or sympathies aside and give Constantine Karamanlis a powerful enough mandate to be able to guide the country’s destinies with no fear of suffering any reverses or laying himself open to votes of ‘no confidence’ in parliament.
In voting for Karamanlis, the people voted for stability and for a period of grace during which the country’s extremely urgent foreign and financial problems could be solved by the only man they deemed capable of solving them.
Some apologists for the poor showing of the left-wing parties claim that it stems from the fear of many of their supporters that too strong a leftist vote might alarm the military again and cause the tanks to rumble into the streets for another coup. This and the low profiles projected by Communist leaders Emmanuel Florakis and Ilias Iliou, plus the very little time Karamanlis allowed the parties to gird themselves for these elections, are said to have caused people who would normally have voted for the United Left to switch their votes to Karamanlis.
Other observers believe that the working classes have succeeded in obtaining so many benefits during the past seven years and enjoyed such an unprecedented degree of prosperity during the building boom, that very many of them have made the transition from the proletariat to the petite bourgeoisie and that the Communist Party has lost their vote forever.
Another argument put forward to explain the relatively poor showing of the Centre Union-New Forces party is that most of the New Forces candidates were intellectuals and, as such, unintelligible to the masses who could more easily understand the directness of Constantine Karamanlis and the bluntness of Andreas Papandreou.
Finally, some observers ask you to add up the communist, the socialist and the centre votes to find the true percentage (45 per cent) of the left-wing element in Greece, on the grounds that it was personalities such as John Pesmazoglou, Virginia Tsouderos, George Mangakis, Dimitrios Tsatsos and Anastasios Peponis — all inveterate socialists — who gave the party its 20 per cent of the vote.
Whatever the reasons behind Karamanlis’ resounding victory, the fact remains that he has been given strong and solid reins of power to move on to the next phases of the country’s political life which are: 1) The referendum for the future of the monarchy slated for December 8; 2) A settlement of the Cyprus question and a return to friendly relations between Greece and Turkey; 3) Our status with NATO; 4) Keeping the lid on inflation and getting the economy to move again so we can keep up the rate of growth we have enjoyed since 1969; 5) Deciding on what sort of republic we are to have if the monarchy is voted down: a presidential republic with increased powers invested in the President a la De Gaulle, or a republic with a figurehead president and with the real power invested in parliament and the prime minister.
The next few years are going to be interesting and one cannot be blamed for looking ahead at them with a good measure of hope.
