Metapolitefsi

Metapolitefsi (Μεταπολίτευση), translated as Regime change, refers to the period in Greek history after the fall of the Greek military junta of 1967-1974 and it includes the transition period between the fall of the dictatorship and the Greek legislative elections of 1974 as well as the democratic period immediately after these elections.

Prologue

Papadopoulos' flawed liberalization process: The metapolitefsi that never was

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A Metapolitefsi that failed: Spyros Markezinis taking the oath of office during Papadopoulos' attempt at metapolitefsi under the watchful eyes of George Papadopoulos. Odysseas Angelis is also present at the ceremony

In September 1973, George Papadopoulos pursuing a liberalization plan for the dictatorship, initiated his own attempt at metapolitefsi aiming to legalize the junta government and rehabilitate its image as an international pariah, and feeling confident about his grasp on power after a six year dictatorship career that saw him appoint himself with zeal to every possible high echelon position in the Greek government including Regent, a largely ceremonial post but high on its vanity value, appointed Spiros Markezinis as Prime Minister of Greece, with the task to lead Greece to parliamentary rule that at the same time he undermined by making the powers of the President of Greece, a position that of course he held, vastly superior to Parliamentary ones.

Spiros Markezinis nevertheless, for reasons still unclear, accepted this flawed task and sensing that power at last was shifting ever so gradually to the politicians from the iron grip of the military demanded that Papadopoulos curtail any military interference that could hinder the process, imperfect as it was. Papadopoulos having secured for himself presidential powers approaching dictatorial and wanting to show his largesse not only acquiesced but he also proceeded with a wide range of liberalization measures such as abolishing martial law, easing censorship of the press and freeing political prisoners.

Relatively free elections were proclaimed soon after in which political formations including part of the traditional left, but not the Communists that were still outlawed, were expected to participate. By reducing the size of the political spectrum of Greece that could freely participate in the elections and thus traumatizing the electorate reeling from memories of anti-communism that divided Greece since the Greek Civil War, Papadopoulos gave the already stilted process of his attempt at metapolitefsi another blow so severe that it could normally classify as dead on arrival.

At the same time he antagonized the old political elite of the country, encompassing politicians such as Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Stephanos Stephanopoulos etc., that could not accept participating in such a process where some of their colleagues from the left remained illegal just so as to satisfy junta's dogma, not to mention their distaste for the concentration of powers at the hands of the President, as well as the fact that they could not forget that during Papadopoulos' tenure at the junta's helm they themselves were constantly demonized as palaiokommatistes meaning old party system men.

The miscalculations and inherent contradictions that would finally derail Papadopoulos' attempt at metapolitefsi had already started to pile up even at this early stage of the process.

A nervous transition

Transitions especially those from Dictatorship to Democracy are difficult and fraught with dangers. During the transition there is uncertainty and anxiety. As well there exists a great pent up demand for affirming long dormant civil rights such as demonstrations. The student movement in Greece was particularly hard hit by the dictatorship and student activists were marginalized and suppresed all in the name of anti-communism. Early student activism during the dictatorship included Geology student Kostas Georgakis setting himself ablaze in Genoa, Italy in 1970 as a protest against the junta and served to demonstrate the depth of the resistance and resentment against the regime.

Student activism in Greece was traditionally strong and unlike the run of the mill dictatorships where Democracy was a distant dream, it had a long and established record of action in democratic times and, more importantly, it possessed the memory of past democratic action. What better way to affirm the newly re-established political rights and at the same time test their robustness than to start a good old pre-dictatorship type student protest? As well the stiff constraints imposed by the rigid and artificial Papadopoulos transition upon the democratic body politic of Greece antagonized not only the politicians but also the intelligentsia whose primary exponents were the students.

Not unexpectedly in November 1973 the Athens Polytechnic uprising broke out starting with the usual student protest tactics such as building occupations, radio broadcasts etc. The student uprising is believed to have been spontaneous, and not orchestrated by any political groups in Greece. In fact a smaller uprising had preceded it two weeks earlier at the Athens Law School and it was still active even as the Polytechneion events were unfolding.

Tragedy as experiment: Give us real Democracy or nothing at all

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The end of the Papadopoulos liberalization experiment: Military tank standing in front of the Athens Polytechneion, providing crowd control junta style. Eventually, this vehicle would crush the gates of the Polytechneion in November 17 1973, putting a violent end to the student uprising and ending hopes of a peaceful democratic transition.

In normal (democratic) times such a protest would have been defused using tactics based on usual historical precedents such as negotiations with student leaders and if that failed using normal crowd control methods followed by more negotiations etc.

However this student protest happened in the middle of the unprecedented political experiment of transition from dictatorship to democracy. Given that the main engineer of the transition, namely Papadopoulos, did not have much experience in democratic transitions, in fact he did not have any experience in Democracy of any kind, the rest of the events took a life of their own.

Initially the inexperience of the regime in handling civil protest showed in the clumsy way they tried to marginalize and downplay the event. They represented the protests as politically motivated and originating from opponents of the liberalization process. When that did not work they initially did not react in a decisive way and being dictators, even during their liberalization process, (which in itself is some kind of oxymoron), did not think much of negotiating.

That inaction gave the student protest momentum and it eventually evolved into a universal demonstration against the dictatorship. Then the transitional government panicked, and since their crowd control method of choice was historically the tank, they sent one crashing through the gates of the Polytechneion. In fact Merkezinis himself had the humiliating task to request from Papadopoulos the re-imposition of Martial law following the events of the Polytechneion.

This persistent lack of imagination and flexibility, that betrayed the absence of any real democratic ethos or political intelligence in all of Papadopoulos' actions, sealed the fate of his attempt at political and social engineering in Greece.

By institutionalizing anti-communism during the junta years and in his subsequent experiment of transition to Democracy, Papadopoulos painted himself as a permanent divider of the Greek psyche, at a time when the people needed unity and accommodation of all political parties in a modern political arena free from the collective trauma of the Greek Civil War. Unfortunately for the country and himself, he had to be divisive and anti-communist from the beginning because otherwise his coup d'état would not have made sense.

Therefore almost like a tragic hero, except for the fact that he was despised, in the land that created tragedy he could not escape his fate from the day he appeared at the proscenium as a junta protagonist because of the inherent contradictions and non sequiturs of the coup itself.

As the engineer of his attempted metapolitefsi and hindered by his own limitations and thirst for power as well as the actions and the divisive political message of the junta, Papadopoulos proposed political structures that were intrinsically unsound and therefore obsolete and repeatedly led to tragic results for the whole country. Ironically, in his biographical notes published as a booklet by supporters in 1980 it is mentioned that he attended Polytechneion at the department of Civil engineering but did not graduate.

It is no coincidence that his experiment failed at the gates of the prime Engineering School of the country. Engineers have a keen eye for structures that are failure prone and do not want to be housed under them.

Back to (dictatorial) orthodoxy

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Left to right: Gizikis, Papadopoulos and Ioannides in happier times

The scenario surrounding the events around Polytechneion unfolded precisely as hoped for by the dictatorship's more shadowy members such as Dimitrios Ioannides, long critical of Papadopoulos and his perceived softening up to Democracy and Papadopoulos' pursuit of a more independent foreign policy toward the United States.

Being a man of action, but not very careful or introspective, Ioannides did not wait long. On 25 November 1973 using the uprising as a pretext he staged a countercoup that overthrew Papadopoulos, and put an abrupt and dramatic end to Markezinis' attempt for transition to democratic rule. In fact the coup actually was planned months prior to the events of Polytechneion.

Ioannidis, having planned this well in advance and following the usual coup script he was so familiar with and had such extensive practice and experience in, arrested Markezinis and Papadopoulos, cancelled the elections, reinstated martial law and appointed Phaedon Gizikis, an old dictatorship workhorse devoid of any charisma, drifting from coup to coup, unable or unwilling to engage in independent thought and faithful follower of Ioannides' orders, as the new President.

At least Ioannides was under no democratic illusions. There would be no metapolitefsi under him. He was prepared for the long haul. He was prepared for a dictatorship run of 30 or more years. He was engineering the ice age of Democracy in Greece. Having a simpler mind than Papadopoulos he solved the Democratic transition dilemma in a simpler way: By not having any transition at all. No transition no dilemma. Dictators are us.

Democracy in a coma: Enter Ioannides

Ioannides liked to work in the shadows and the shadows just became lighter as he put himself squarely in the driver's seat of the Police state, euphemistically called government, hidden only by the faint shadows of his puppets. The new puppet regime pursued an aggressive internal crackdown and an expansionist foreign policy.

The iceman cometh

During the Papadopoulos junta, in many press conferences, Papadopoulos delighted in using the patient in a cast analogy to describe his assault on the body politic of Greece. He used to say that he put the patient (Greece) in a cast so that they could fix her skeletal structure, obviously implying her political structure.

Ioannides was not a man of many words and did not bother to offer any analogies for his proposed treatment. But his actions spoke louder than words: The cast was not sufficient any longer. He was prepared to freeze the patient. Greece had to be put into an Ioannides induced frozen coma.

If Papadopoulos was the self proclaimed orthopedic surgeon of the Greek body politic, Ioannidis was the iceman.

Little shop of ESA

To freeze a body you must lower the temperature drastically and nothing freezes the temperature of politics in a country faster than fear. Ioannides' main instrument of fear was the dreaded interrogators of the Greek Military Police (EAT/ESA, Greek: ΕΑΤ/ΕΣΑ: Ειδικόν Ανακριτικόν Τμήμα Ελληνικής Στρατιωτικής Αστυνομίας transliterated as: Eidikon Anakritikon Tmima Ellinikis Stratiotikis Astynomias ominously translating as : Special Interrogation Unit of the Greek Military Police). Using EAT/ESA offices and prison cells as torture chambers he launched an all out assault on Greek civil society.

He moved quickly to stifle any dissent and reinstituted repressive measures such as heavy censorship, expulsions, detentions and torture worse than even the worst days under Papadopoulos. Gone was the usual anti-communist pretext. Everyone was fair game as long as they got noticed. Artists, painters, intellectuals whose only crime was voicing some anti-junta nova opinion or created a work that criticized the junta nova, automatically got dispatched to the nearest neighbourhood EAT/ESA house of torture. In other words Ioannides' junta nova was dispensing torture the same way a drugstore chain dispenses medicine, except that Ioannides' chain did not issue any receipts.

People would be held incommunicado and without EAT/ESA notifying anyone for weeks or months on end and would only be allowed limited communication thereafter with their families through the Greek Red Cross, a function that Red Cross normally performs in wartime and for enemy prisoners not Greek citizens, if they were lucky enough to be discovered. Loud music would often be heard coming out from these detention centres. It was to suppress the screams of the victims. The extent of the oppression was such that even by the already low standards of the Papadopoulos dictatorship this new regime more closely resembled that of a banana republic than its predecessor.

The operation, however, according to Ioannides' standards was successful. The patient's vital signs were barely perceptible. Democracy was comatose in the land of Pericles.

Foreign policy by coup

Having successfully terrorized the population the junta nova then embarked on the Cyprus adventure that only a dictator such as Ioannides could perceive as foreign policy and since his understanding of political science or even political engineering was rather limited and mainly centred around the term coup d'état he launched one against Makarios III. Gizikis, as usual, oblidged by issuing the order for the coup on Ioannides' behalf.

Makarios was at the time both Archbishop and President of Cyprus. He was deposed by the military coup of July 15, 1974 and replaced by Nikos Sampson. However the coup backfired as Turkey reacted with Operation Atilla on July 20; the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had began.

Ioannides, a serial putschist (Greek:κατά σειρά πραξικοπηματίας, transliterated as: kata seira praxikopimatias, translated as: coup instigator in series) by now, was on his way out. The country was suffering from coup overload.

The post invasion paralysis and the Metapolitefsi paradox

Immediately after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus the dictators, not expecting such a disastrous outcome, finally decided that Ioannides' serial coup approach was catastrophic for the interests of the country. The complete rationale for their subsequent actions, even to this day, is not known. Analysis of their motives can improve with time as new details come to the fore.

However indications of panic and indecision were manifestly evident from the reaction of the Greek public as they raided supermarkets fearing an all out war with Turkey and sensing the inability of the junta nova to govern through its inaction, as well as the anxious attempts of the junta nova members to communicate with and surrender power to the very same members of the democratic Establishment of Greece that they had demonized and maligned for seven years and they worked so hard to replace with a New Greece (Νέα Ελλάδα) completely devoid of any link with the old party system (παλαιοκομματισμός (palaiokommatismos: Junta term for the old, (pre-junta), democratic party system)) and its politicians. It was as if the brave new world of Ellas Ellinon Christianon (translated as Greece of the Christian Greeks, or to put it in layman's terms: minorities need not apply) envisaged and pursued so fervently by the junta was neither brave nor new and it led straight back to the past.

This paradox is at the centre of the phenomenon known as Metapolitefsi.

Deus ex machina

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Konstantinos Karamanlis arrives in Athens on the French Presidential jet, courtesy of French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, to assume the leadeship of government of national unity that would lead to free elections. He is greeted by a jubilant crowd of supporters craving for the restoration of democratic rule.

Greece is the birthplace of the Theatre as well as Democracy. In ancient theatrical plays every time the plot got too tangled for a rational resolution, catharsis (Greek for cleansing i.e. resolution as in cleaning up the mess) came in the form of a god (Deus ex machina (translated from Latin as God from the machine)), that descended from above with the aid of mechanical devices such as levers, cranes and pulleys i.e. from a machine, and dispensed resolution to even the most complex of predicaments.

The complexity of the post invasion plot of the Greek political scene in 1974 resembled that of even the most tangled of ancient theatrical plays.

It also came with its own Deus ex machina (Greek: Από μηχανής Θεός). The machine this time was more modern, it was a jet and there was no actor but a well trusted and famous politician. The function however was the same: Catharsis.

Catharsis on the wings of a jet: Karamanlis arrives in Athens

Following the Cyprus invasion by the Turks, the dictators finally abandoned Ioannides and his bankrupt policies. On the 23 July 1974, President Phaedon Gizikis called a meeting of old guard politicians, including Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Spiros Markezinis, Stephanos Stephanopoulos, Evangelos Averoff and others. The heads of the armed forces also participated in the meeting The agenda was to appoint a national unity government that would lead the country to elections.

Former Prime Minister Panagiotis Kanellopoulos was originally suggested as the head of the new interim government. He was the democratically elected Prime Minister originally deposed by the dictatorship and a distinguished politician who had repeatedly criticized Papadopoulos and his successor. Raging battles were still taking place in Cyprus' north when Greeks took to the streets in all the major cities, celebrating the junta's decision to relinquish power before the war in Cyprus could spill all over the Aegean. But talks in Athens were going nowhere with Gizikis' offer to Panayiotis Kanellopoulos to form a government.

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Metapolitefsi at its dawn: Junta President Phaedon Gizikis and the heads of the armed forces convene with old guard politicians to relinquish power to democratic rule.

Nonetheless, after all the other politicians departed without reaching a decision, Evangelos Averoff remained in the meeting room and further engaged Gizikis. He insisted that Karamanlis was the only political personality who could lead a successful transition government, taking into consideration the new circumstances and dangers both inside and outside the country. Gizikis and the heads of the armed forces initially expressed reservations, but they finally became convinced by Averoff's arguments. Admiral Arapakis was the first, among the participating military leaders, to express his support for Karamanlis. After Averoff's decisive intervention, Gizikis decided to invite Konstantinos Karamanlis to assume the premiership. Throughout his stay in France, Karamanlis was a thorn at the side of the junta because he possessed the credibility and popularity they lacked both in Greece and abroad and he also criticized them very often. Now he was called to end his self imposed exile and restore Democracy to the place that originally created it: Greece.

Upon news of his impending arrival cheering Athenian crowds took to the streets chanting: Ερχεται! Ερχεται! Here he comes! Here he comes! Similar celebrations broke out all over Greece. Athenians in their thousands also went to the airport to greet him.

Karamanlis returned to Athens on a French Presidency Lear Jet made available to him by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a close personal friend, and was sworn-in as Prime Minister under President Phaedon Gizikis who remained temporarily in power for legal continuity reasons.

Despite being faced with an inherently unstable and dangerous political situation, which forced him to sleep aboard a yacht watched over by a naval destroyer for several weeks after his return, Karamanlis moved swiftly to defuse the tension between Greece and Turkey, which came on the brink of war over the Cyprus crisis, and begin the process of transition from military rule to a pluralist democracy.

Metapolitefsi through Democracy: The transition that worked

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Metapolitefsi day one: Konstantinos Karamanlis taking the oath of office during metapolitefsi under the watchful eyes of Phaedon Gizikis on 24th July 1974 at 4:15 a.m. Ironically, they stand at the same place and in the same hall Markezinis stood less than a year before during his swearing in ceremony

During this transition period of the metapolitefsi, Karamanlis legalized the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) that was constantly demonized by the junta, cleverly using this political move as an easy differentiator between the stubborn junta rigidity on the matter that smacked of totalitarianism and his own realpolitik approach honed by years of practicing democracy.

The legalization of the Communist Party was also meant as a gesture of political inclusionism and rapprochement. At the same time he also freed all political prisoners and pardoned all political crimes against the junta. This approach was warmly received by the people, long weary of junta divisive polemics. Following through with his reconciliation theme he also adopted a measured approach to removing collaborators and appointees of the dictatorship from the positions they held in government bureaucracy, and, wanting to officially inaugurate the new democratic era in Greek politics as soon as possible, declared that elections would be held in November 1974, a mere four months after the collapse of the Régime of the Colonels. This statesmanlike approach pleased the right as well as the left and greatly lowered the political temperature of the country. It is also another reason why the Democracy driven metapolitefsi worked.

In the Greek legislative election, 1974, Karamanlis with his newly formed conservative party, not coincidentally named New Democracy (Greek: Νέα Δημοκρατία, transliterated in English as: Nea Demokratia) obtained a massive parliamentary majority and was elected Prime Minister. The elections were soon followed by the 1974 plebiscite on the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the Hellenic Republic, the televised 1975 trials of the former dictators (who received death sentences for high treason and mutiny that were later commuted to life incarceration) and the writing of the 1975 constitution.

New Democracy went on to win the Greek legislative election, 1977, and Karamanlis continued to serve as Prime Minister until May 10, 1980.