The Ever Volatile Politics of Greece

Henry Srebrnik [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Greece is in grave economic trouble. Its six-year recession has been deepened by budget cuts tied to $321 billion worth of loans from the euro area and International Monetary Fund. The lenders have demanded a structural overhaul of the economy in return for bailing out the country’s public finances.

This has cost Greece about a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP) and left it with an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent.

The crisis has spawned extremist parties on both left and right. In the recent elections to the European parliament, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) won 26.6 per cent of the popular vote, good for first place, while the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up 9.4 per cent, to emerge as the third-largest political party in Greece.

SYRIZA also controls 71 of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament, while Golden Dawn has 18.

But this is nothing new. Greek politics have always been volatile – and violent. It is a very polarized society.

Our images of Greece often focus on its ancient history – the classical monuments and statues, the temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenon in Athens, the martial city-state of Sparta, and so on.

But today’s Greece is the heir, not of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, but of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, which lasted one thousand years before being destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its religious and political capital was Constantinople (now Istanbul), not Athens.

The fervently Christian Greeks lived under Muslim Ottoman rule for some four centuries, slowly regaining their homeland after winning their independence in 1830 following a lengthy uprising.

While the last full-scale Greco-Turkish War was fought almost a century ago, relations remain tense, especially over the fate of the divided island of Cyprus, which has a Greek majority but is much closer to the Turkish mainland.

Greece was conquered by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1940-1941 and suffered greatly during the three-year occupation that followed. The Germans set up a collaborationist government, which included some high-profile officers of the pre-war Greek regime.

The occupation resulted in mass starvation; more than 40,000 civilians died in Athens alone. As well, the country’s economy was ruined.

Resistance movements were formed, and from 1943 on large areas of the countryside witnessed reprisals by Nazis and their collaborators, including the burning of settlements and massive executions by the Germans; tens of thousands perished.

The main group fighting the Axis occupation was the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM), with its military branch, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). By 1944 the EAM had established its own government in liberated areas. It dominated the country except for the major cities, especially Athens, where newly-arrived British forces supported the pre-war government.

Meanwhile, opposition from rival resistance groups from the centre and right evolved into a civil war in 1944.

In December of that year, British troops in Athens opened fire on a massive unarmed pro-EAM rally, killing 28 demonstrators and injuring dozens, and British troops would continue to battle the Communist-led forces. Greece had been a British client state in the 19th century and was again one.

In effect, the Cold War had begun -- – a full half year before the end of the Second World War itself.  The EAM-ELAS forces were supplied by the new Communist regimes in neighbouring Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. It took five more years, and massive amounts of American aid, before the Communists lost.

The civil war left behind bitterness and suspicion. At least 150,000 people had died, and another 100,000 had fled the country. Many of the anti-Communist military officers would become involved in the 1967 coup that seized power to forestall a scheduled election that would likely have been won by parties of the political left.

The “Regime of the Colonels” brought seven years of dictatorship, repression, and torture. It became illegal to strike, to demonstrate, to oppose the government, and to congregate for any purpose except for church.

The junta fell in 1974, after an abortive attempt to unite Cyprus with Greece, which led to a Turkish invasion and partition of the island.

Today, the country is led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, head of the New Democracy Party, founded in 1974. His coalition government includes members of the left-wing Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Democratic Left (DIMAR).

Although Greece is once again a democracy, the legacy of dictatorship and civil war continues to haunt the country.