Reappointed to lead the interim Government, Mr. Rallis retained his former colleagues with the exception of those heading the Ministries of Justice, Interior and Public Order, which are most immediately responsible for the orderly procedure of the campaign and the election.
The number of political parties changed during the course of the campaign, smaller ones consolidating with larger ones, but the vast majority of voters were represented by about a baker’s dozen. There were, however, a rash of tiny, often merely local, parties which expressed almost every idiosyncracy to be found in human nature, from anti-masonic fundamentalism and neo-Kropotkin anarchism to irredentist groups that seemed intent on re-establishing the borders of the Byzantine Empire at the tune of Justinian.
As the campaign opened, the deputies went off to their constituencies, and rallies were organized which took place in the cent ral squares of nearly every town in the country. These demonstrations were duly photographed by cameras with telescopic lenses, strategically located which can make a modest group of 500 look like a formidable crowd of 5000. These photos were then blown up to cover the front pages of each party’s journalistic organ, giving the impression that every one of them would run off with the lion’s share of
the vote.
For the most part there were few irregularities. Some communist organizations complained to the inter-party council of harassment in the royalist hamlets of Mount Taygetus, but the absolute fairness of the campaign procedure and the voting process on election day was never in doubt, as it was during the Junta, and often in pre-Junta days.
That incidents should have been reported taking place in Iraklion can only be expected from Greece’s most passionate city. Overwhelmingly Venezelist in the past-and equally pro-PASOK today — its political bias is matched only by its cultural possessiveness. It will be recalled that in 1979 angry crowds surrounded the Archaeological Museum and prevented any of its treasures from joining the Exhibition of Aegean Art being sent abroad. In like spirit, when the populace heard that two cruise ships filled with conservative Cretans living on the mainland were arriving to attend a rally of New Democracy, they decended to the port in order to prevent their disembarkation. Street blocks were effective and the rally was not a success. Indeed, the square where it took place contained numbers of villagers on donkeys who were unable to go home, with the result that there was a good deal of braying.
The full brunt of the campaign fell on Athens in the ten-day period prior to the elections. Every week-day evening, each of the leading parties held massive rallies in Constitution or Omonia Squares. Athens is said to be one of the noisiest cities in the world under normal conditions with a decibel level that has alarmed doctors and psychiatrists. With lines of loudspeakers banked up on temporary superstructures several storeys high serving to amplify thousands of voices to be heard on nation-wide television, the bedlam was shattering. The pigeons which haunt the area around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier fled into the National Gardens – and it is surprising that even he was not aroused from his eternal slumbers.
The two crescendi were reached on the Thursday and Friday evenings before election Sunday, the rallies of PASOK and New Democracy, respectively. Clusters of helium-filled balloons (green for PASOK, blue for ND) and blizzards of leaflets which they dropped filled the sky while the flag-waving, placard-bearing, poster-bobbing crowds seemed more numerous than the gathering of the host of angels on Judgment Day.
On Saturday there was a respite for the Athenians who remained at home, although not for the million inliabitants of the metropoUtan area who streamed out of the city to vote in their home towns all over the country, nor for the sanitation employees who doggedly continued sweeping up mountains of rubbish. Sunday passed quietly, too, as citizens voted — at least until a few hours after sunset when the first returns showed a landslide for PASOK. Although an order barring public demonstrations that night had been decreed, the supporters of Andreas Papandreou’s call for change streamed into Constitution Square in a spirit of Carnival, blowing tin horns, beating on tamborines, and carrying coffins symbolizing the demise of sixteen years’ right-wing rule.
On the sobering morning after the elections, it was perhaps significant that a right-wing daily should print, amid the bad news, a large advertisement for home safes. “A strong-box at home or a safe deposit at the bank?” it queried. Perhaps it was appealing to a certain uneasiness in the minds of the paper’s readers.
That evening PASOK organized parties in all the municipalities of the metropolitan area. There was free wine, beer, and souvlaki, music and dancing, and trays carried heaps of green-dyed eggs, which people cracked in the manner of Easter. Indeed the rising green sun of PASOK had ascended.
On October 21, Andreas Papandreou took the oath of office at the Presidential Mansion, along with his new Ministers. Prominent among them was the new Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, carrying a green carnation. Later, the new Prime Minister appeared before his cabinet and told them to go to their respective ministries in the spirit of change, and as representatives of all Greeks.
Subsequently, the Prime Minister appeared at “the Pentagon” because he carries as well the portfolio of National Defense. If some high-level figures abandoned their offices in undue haste, the outgoing Minister of Defense Averof, was his relaxed and affable self as he greeted the Prime Minister at the door and provided him with a guard of honor. It was a moment of particular significance for those who remembered that George Papandreou resigned in 1965 because the King refused to allow him to become his own Defense Minister.
At the conference which followed, Mr. Averof in friendly fashion offered Mr. Papandreou a cigarette which the Prime Minister happily took — all on national television!
Peace to the shade of ex-Minister of Social Welfare, Spyros Doxiadis, the pediatrician who has been concerned with the hazards to our health for so many years – now that the majority is growing up, and of course, wants change.
