Such ‘formations’ have been loosely held together by general philosophies —whether right-wing or liberal— often for reasons of immediate expediency, and as clusters around charismatic or meteoric personalities. The lifespan of parties has tended to be governed by the rise and fall of individuals so that parties have not endured.
The same family names do recur on the political scene, however, perpetuated on the basis of fiefdoms. Allegiances, along with the support of local power bases, are transferred from one facet of the political spectrum to the other in response to the prevailing political mood. The only exception to this rule has been the communist parties —of which there are now several. Thus, voters in the forthcoming elections will be confronted by an array of political parties and coalitions, many of which, in name at least, did not exist a few years ago, and most of whose political doctrines are confusingly fluid.
It is assumed that Prime Minister Karamanlis’s New Democracy Party (ND) will be returned to power. The ND came into existence in 1974 after Mr. Karamanlis returned from almost eleven years of self-exile in France to take over the reins of government after the collapse of the 1967-74 dictatorship. (In its one hundred and fifty years of existence, Modern Greece has been ruled by many actual or quasi dictatorships.) Despite its new label and enlistees from other parties, the New Democracy party is essentially the National Radical Union (ERE), founded in the 1950s by Mr. Karamanlis. ERE was, simply, a new name for General Alexandros Papagos’s Rally Party whose right-wing elements initially formed ERE’s nucleus. When Prime Minister Papagos died in 1956, it was assumed that his Foreign Minister, Stefanos Stephanopoulos, would succeed him. Instead, King Paul called upon the Rally Government’s relatively-unknown Minister of Communications and Public Works, Constantine Karamanlis, to form a government. Running under the ERE banner, Mr. Karamanlis was Prime Minister for eight consecutive years, losing finally to George Papandreou’s Centre Union in 1963.
During his first tenureship as Prime Minister, Mr. Karamanlis was a staunch royalist who enjoyed the support of arch-conservatists in an era of considerable political repression. (The island prisons which aroused so much indignation during the junta years existed during the 1950s but were condoned even by liberals who believed that a semi-police state was necessary to control the left-wing threat.) Since his return to power three years ago, Mr. Karamanlis has shown a decided tilt towards the social-democratic tradition of Western Europe to the dissatisfaction of many of his former followers.
In response to this, a new conservative party has been formed, the National Alignment Party. Its leader is Stefanos Stephanopoulos, Mr. Karamanlis’s former colleague in the Rally Party. Mr. Stephanopoulos has taken a circuitous route to arrive at his current role as leader of the most right-wing party in this month’s election. He abandoned Mr. Karamanlis, and ERE, and joined the Centre Union Party to become Mr. Papandreou’s Deputy Prime Minister in the 1960s. He later deserted Mr. Papandreou and as leader of a coalition of various-and-sundry political hues —from left-wingers to reactionaries— was Prime Minister for nearly eighteen months during the turbulent years preceding the 1967 coup. With the newly-formed National Alignment Party, he hopes to win support from disenchanted royalists and right-wingers who feel that Mr. Karamanlis has moved too far left in his policies.
The major opposition party in the last three years has been the Union of the Democratic Centre (EDIK), led by Mr. George Mavros. EDIK is the result of a marriage between the social-democratic ‘New Forces’ and the remnants of the Centre Union Party (EK) founded by the late George Papandreou in 1961. Despite many other claimants and various transformations over the years, the Centre Union (and now EDIK) is generally regarded as the spiritual heir to the Liberal Party formed in 1910 by Eleftherios Venizelos, the most venerated statesman of Modern Greece. The Centre Union under George Papandreou won a substantial majority in the 1963 elections. It was expected to win an even greater majority in the elections scheduled for May, 1967. They were never held because of the military take-over of April 21 of that year. Many of the Centre Union’s traditional supporters deserted the party in 1974, a substantial number joining Mr. Karamanlis’s New Democracy. (A smaller number recently formed yet another party, the New Liberals, under the leadership of Constantine Mitsotakis. Like Mr. Stephanopoulos, he was a member of George Papandreou’s cabinet in the 1960s but deserted the Centre Union during a government crisis.)
Although widely regarded as the political heir to his father who died in 1968, and, therefore, the presumed leader of the Centre Union Party, Andreas Papandreou, upon his return to Greece after the fall of the junta in 1974, formed his own party, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). It has drawn little support from traditional Centre Unionists. Since its formation, furthermore, PASOK has lost the support of many of its original collaborators, some of whom were expelled from the party. In many respects PASOK represents something new in the Greek political arena: an attempt by a non-communist party to build a grass-roots, ideologically-based organization throughout the nation. This is not surprising. Mr. Papandreou, a former academician of some repute, is a highly trained economic theoretician. Trained in the United States where he spent most of his adult life, he is as much a product of a modern, western technocratic society as he is of the Greece of his youth, then rural and underdeveloped. He returned to Greece in the 1950’s at the invitation of Prime Minister Karamanlis to found the Centre of Economic Research (which still exists under the acronym of KEPE). He entered Greek politics via the Centre Union Party and was an active and controversial member of his father’s government in the 1960s.
Despite its progressive, often radical social and economic policies, PASOK is firmly planted in the personality-cult tradition of Greek politics: there is no doubt that PASOK is Mr. Papandreou’s party. This, in addition to an overzealous nationalism, has lost Mr. Papandreou the support of many socialists, who consider his approach to be intrinsically contradictory and anachronistic. According to this reasoning, PASOK has precluded the formation of a unified socialist party in the Western-European tradition which has led, instead, to the formation of a plethora of divided socialist groups. Regardless of the outcome of this year’s election, Mr. Papandreou is not the random event many of his detractors believe him to be, but a force to be reckoned with in the future.
Five other socialist groups have joined forces recently and will run under the banner of ‘The Alliance of Leftist and Progressive Forces’, led by Elias Eliou, the president of the United Democratic Left (EDA). When, after the Civil War, the Communist Party was outlawed in the 1950 s (it remained illegal until 1974), what was left of its leaders and supporters took cover under the umbrella of EDA. A political outcast in the minds of all but left-wingers for many years, Mr. Eliou has, since the return to parliamentary government in 1974, earned the respect of even his staunchest political detractors for the consistency of his ideology, and for his moderation, pragmatism, and simple dignity as an opposition leader in parliament. In addition to EDA, the participants in ‘The Alliance of the Five’ are the Communist Party of the Interior (the Eurocommunists led by Babis Dracopoulos); The Socialist March (a break-away PASOK splinter group); the Socialist Initiative Party (consisting mainly of a runaway faction from the ‘New Forces’ group of EDIK); and the tiny Christian Democrat Party. The latter raises a note of nostalgia. Its leader is the highly-principled Nikos Psaroudakis, the Editor of the now-defunct Christianiki, a small-circulation, secular-religious newspaper which, in the darkest hours of the junta period after the Polytechnic massacre, defied the strict censorship during the reign-of-terror atmosphere (the only newspaper to do so), and published a quietly-outraged humanitarian protest. It won him the admiration of the frustrated populace and the wrath of the military government which promptly closed the paper.
Finally, running on a separate ticket, is the traditional, fundamentalist, Moscow-oriented Communist Party, unofficially referred to as the KKE-x, the ‘x’ denoting its allegiance to the exterior. Given the ever-changing nature of parties, its hard-line, consistent stand is peculiarly comforting to many. It is not unusual to hear even conservative citizens, weary of the kaleidoscopic scene, muttering, I think I’ll vote for KKE-x. At least I know what they stand for!’
Reflections of a Racer
ON A recent visit to Greece the world-famous racing driver, Jacky Stewart, had some interesting advice on driving skills to offer at a press conference. The Scottish expert, who has been racing for thirteen years in all quarters of the globe and won three world championships with his Formula One, was presumably addressing himself to professional drivers but we took careful note of his suggestions. Unlike Jacky Stewart, we have not travelled to the four corners of the earth in a Formula One, but we have experienced all the excitement of the narrow escapes of a rally driver while driving through the streets of Athens, and like all good Athenians believe ourselves to be international rally material. There are several points, however, where we must take issue with Mr. Stewart.
‘As soon as he gets behind the wheel and shuts the door’, he counseled, ‘a good driver must concentrate exclusively on driving.’ The idea of shutting the door before starting off is usually sensible but with all due respect to Mr. Stewart’s expertise, we feel we should point out that we have witnessed virtuoso performances with the door open. One of our more vivid recollections is of a truck speeding past us one rainy day along Kifissias Avenue not only with the door open but with the driver halfway out across the windshield repairing the wiper, with his mate trying to hold an umbrella over his head to protect him from the rain. All this at ninety kilometres an hour. ‘To concentrate exclusively on driving’, however, is expecting too much of us. To wit, most Athenians spend a good portion of their time stranded in traffic jams. If we were to concentrate exclusively on driving during these interludes, it would be impossible to read our newspapers, discuss politics with the taxi driver pulled up alongside, let alone eat a souvlaki, a yogurt, or sip a cup of coffee. Above all, how are we to engage in animated conversations with the person in the back seat, or several cars behind, when both hands are on the steering wheel and our attention on driving?
‘The automobile,’ continued Mr. Stewart, Ms a deadly weapon, and must be handled with care.’ The automobile, we must protest, is not regarded as a weapon by Greeks. To us a car is like a Stradivarius, a fine, delicately-tuned instrument with which we express any variety of emotions: anger, jealousy, irritation, impatience, sloth, vanity, arrogance and braggadocio, as well as playfulness, vivacity, carefree absent-mindedness, or general joie de vivre.
Mr. Stewart’s next remark we found somewhat presumptuous: ‘You must show compassion to the other drivers,’ he said, ‘because the road is not for you alone.’ Here in Greece we enjoy a free enterprise system. Ownership of the roads is gained by the most audacious and adventuresome, drawing on uninhibited individualism to devise whatever tactics are necessary to nudge out the competition.
Although Mr. Stewart noted that much progress is being made in automotive safety devices and that cars are now being produced ‘with double-breaking systems, tighter gripping tires and firmer steering wheels’, there is no reason to panic. Far from cramping our driving style, these devices will only make the art of self-expression more subtle and even more daring.
Ί have been here only three days,’ Jacky Stewart admitted anticlimatically at the end of his press conference, adding, in what he no doubt considered a diplomatic understatement, ‘but I think that Greek drivers are undisciplined.’ The best evidence to the contrary is the fact that after that remark, Mr. Stewart was not run down in the streets during the duration of his stay.
