In the first week of March a number of prominent newspapers and journals abroad turned their lofty thoughts toward the Greek political scene. The Economist, which is said never to have made an error in its political predictions since it was founded in A.D. 1066 and the New York Times, all of whose readers bow before the majesty of its op-ed page, were among those which devoted long, ‘insightful’ commentaries on why the left-leaning Panhellenic Socialist Movement under the leadership of Mr Andreas Papandreou was supporting the re-election of the conservative president, Mr Constantine Karamanlis.
Yet, within days – and even within hours – of these in-depth revelations which cast a light as clear as a Cycladic summer’s day on the often murky Greek political scene for the edification of informed readers on several continents, PASOK rejected its support of the incumbent president, not by a small majority, nor even by a large one, but unanimously. Above that, proposals were made for alterations in the constitution – in particular, regarding article 110. The moral is simple. If one wants to go professionally into predictions or cultivate editorial wisdom one should find journalistic employment outside of Greece.
The bomb wasn’t dumping Karamanlis – that could be thought of as rational. That the radically left-leaning PASOK should have supported the conservative Karamanlis was always anomalous. It was the constitutional question raised, and Article 110 in particular, that could be read as the pistol that went off during this concert grosso for conservative solo and radical strings.
Article 110 specifically describes the constitutional powers of the president, to call a referendum on a national issue or to dissolve parliament if he believes that it is acting contrary to the national will.
Of course, if the legislative body feels that it can take over the powers of the executive, the constitution no longer is a document which expresses the national will so much as ordinary group of laws which the legislature can change or emend as it feels fit.
The constitution is read as an expression of whatever government which created it – and therefore can be abrogated by any party that happens to be in power.
So there are articles, too, which become equally fascinating, such as number 48 which involves martial law: it become no longer the extraordinary power of an executive but the ordinary power of a parliament which may enact it whenever it feels the inclination to do so. In brief, the constitution becomes not so much a check on the legislature as a tool for employing its power.
The 1974 constitution may not have the inspired conceptual wholeness of the Constitution of the United States; it may lack the lucidity and the social understandings of the code Napoleon. But it’s a thoughtful read. In its revisions and its abrogations it shows the evidence of many hands – like Homer.
It is a very Greek composition.
In the 141 years since the will of the Greek people forced on King Otto a constitution – in the honor of which the major square of Athens is named – through the 1864 revision which coincided with the accession of George I (said to be for its time one of the most liberal in Europe), the Venizelos revision of 1911, the first republican, or Papanastasiou constitution of 1924, and the revisions of 1927, 1952, 1968 and the constitution of 1974, there has been a continuity, an attempt to set into words the uneasy relationship between the people and the government which it has happened to elect.
Consequently, Greek constitutions have not been examples of durability so much as expressions of change.
John Campbell and Philip Sherrard wrote in Modern Greece published just after the 21 April 1967 coup:
“As in the matter of electoral systems, the constitution enjoys no particular or patriotic respect except when it is infringed by political opponents. It is a code of rules to be manipulated in the interests of a party, or if they will not serve it, to be altered by political manouvre in the case of moderate parties, by force in the case of militant groups of the extreme Left or Right.”
As such, a Greek constitution is not so much the embodiment of national aspirations as the regular, always altering report of a pilot in flight, in which the down-drafts, the up-drafts and the cross-drafts are duly recorded – rational documents which describe less a way of law than a way of life.
