On 24 July, Greece celebrated fifty years of the restoration of democratic government, after a seven-year US-backed military dictatorship. Near the end of their disastrous stint, Greece’s oath-breaking dictators staged a coup against Cypriot President archbishop Makarios III was the perfect excuse for the Turkish invasion of the island nation, splitting it in half. This invasion, in turn, led to the fall of the treasonous dictators and the Restoration of Democracy in Grece, the “Metapolitefsi”, giving birth to the Third Hellenic Republic.
The trials of the oath-breaking Colonels, their collaborators in the judiciary, and the torturers of their paramilitary were merely a ritual of token impeachment of the leaders, with no meaningful result anywhere else: when the overrated statesman Konstantinos Karamanlis commuted the dictators’ death sentences to life imprisonment, he said “and when we say life, we mean life.” However, Pattakos got out of prison on utterly unfounded health grounds and became Spyros-Adonis Georgiades’ Mentor. While in jail, Papadopoulos orchestrated the creation of the Nazi terror gang “Golden Dawn” and the violent nationalist EPEN, appointing as the latter’s leader the person who is now the Greek PM’s second-in-command.
Sadly, the redemocratization of Greece turned out to fall short of expectations. Greece is celebrating fifty years of the Third Hellenic Republic, but the conservative “Nea Dimokratia” (New Democracy) has governed it for twenty-four of them – including three as a coalition government with the socialists of PASOK, the center-left “Democratic Left”, and the ethnoreligious far-right populists of the “Popular Ortodox Rally”. Nea Dimokratia postures as a pro-European, pro-democracy, liberal, and so on, party. However, from the very first moment of its existence it made it plain that it was merely a rebranding and “facelift” of the disgraced, conspiratorial royalist conservatives of the National Radical Union (ERE), hosting most of its politicians. Having these people as Greece’s first post-dictatorship administration should have alarmed everyone, but it did not.
As Greek newspaper “Kathimerini” revealed, deposed monarch Constantine Glücksburg II plotted to overthrow Greece’s newborn unitary parliamentary republic, with his staff even planning to murder high-profile members of the democratically-elected government[1]. What was Nea Dimokratia’s answer to this plot against its government? Did it demand that British authorities arrest and extradite Glücksburg to be tried and sentenced for high treason as he should? Of course not! As Greeks know, Konstantinos “Apostate” Mitsotakis, ever a champion of the monarchy, let the deposed and disgraced Glücksburg spirit out of the former royal palace of Tatoi millions of dollars’ worth of treasures that were paid for by the Greek taxpayers. Plus, the Glücksburg family has ties to the Windsors, which grants them automatic immunity.
As for the anti-democracy deep state machinery, it remained in place: none of the military officers that collaborated with the dictators were removed or indicted; only in 1983 were some of them forced to retire when a new coup, this time against the socialist government of Andreas Papandreou (PASOK) was revealed and thwarted. Many sleeper cells stayed behind throughout the civil service. Of the numerous far-right and pro-dictatorship judges, only one received a token punishment: Yiannis Liapís, infamous for the trial of Alexandros Panagoulis, who was merely placed under house arrest. Of course, none of the far-right thugs in the Police and the Gendarmerie was removed.
Meanwhile, various pundits and talking heads affiliated to Nea Dimokratia and its more conservative faction wasted no time: already as soon as PASOK rose to power, and even before, they set out to discredit it and the new form of government, which, as they claimed, left the country open to be governed by “upstarts”, “neomarxists”, “communists”, “Soviet agents” etc., They promoted a narrative full of Goebbels-style falsehoods about how everything was going to hell with the democratic freedoms that were enshrined in the 1975 Constitution and expanded with the Papandreou administrations, whereas the Junta, the self-styled “Saviors of the Nation”, had supposedly performed an “economic miracle”, “eradicated corruption”, and rendered the country “safe from crime”. This libelous propaganda against democracy took on many forms, some more subtle and insidious, some more obvious and grotesque. In 1990, the “free” corporate, oligarch-owned TV and radio stations started force-feeding the nation with racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. As for the anti-democracy propaganda, it intensified post-2010, to set the stage for the antisocial onslaught that came as standard equipment with the Troika’s vindictive, spiteful austerity.
The Troika gave its blessing and political gravitas to a series of steps that eroded democracy in Greece. Slandered by “respectable” scribes and pundits, labor rights were removed, with the “lazy Greeks that live a life of luxury at the expense of hard-working European taxpayers” trope being deployed extensively in mainstream publications, especially British and German. Then came the turn of social rights (education, healthcare, housing), until the education and health systems were left in tatters and the last vestiges of the country’s poorly-developed social safety network were removed. Of particular interest to the Troika and its apparatchiks in Greece were civil liberties: practically everyone left-of-center was made aware that they could be hit with arbitrary, Dreyfus Affair-like, kafkaesque persecution: from proscription and disciplinary persecution at the workplace to vindictive, debilitating SLAPP lawsuits, from harassment and brutalization by an increasingly violent, exorbitantly militarized and absolutely unaccountable Police, to arbitrary and illegal surveillance of civil society members – see the Predatorgate scandal, which was buried recently by a Supreme Court that makes Trump’s SCOTUS look tame by comparison. Whatever rule of law existed was bypassed or dismantled. To top the dystopia off, the anger and frustration caused by the disastrous austerity was redirected through the continuous promotion of a vitriolic, violent racist-nationalist rhetoric
The Metapolitefsi was half-baked, because it relied for its functioning upon a (deep) state apparatus that hated everything it stood for, so it fought against democracy and subverted it from the very first day. We already wrote about the deposed and disgraced king’s attempt to stage a coup and overthrow the new government. This, however, was not the only such attempt; traitors in the military, some of them having served the Junta and some others loyal to the 1967 dictators sought to overthrow the government in 1975, 1981, and 1983. Sadly, whereas these traitors should have been tried and sentenced for the true nature of their crime, i.e. high treason, they were simply given a slap on the wrist, because their supporters still make a sizeable chunk of Nea Dimokratia’s constituency. Thus, democracy in Greece has always remained vulnerable. Even as we speak, because of the Mitsotakis government’s machinations and the blind support he is given by the European People’s Party, the risk for the country to wind up like Orbán’s Hungary and Morawiecki’s Poland (both of them corrupt autocrats backed by the EPP), Trump’s USA, Milei’s Argentina, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Pinochet’s Chile, or Netanyahu’s Israel is still here. Without a very thorough clean-up of the state and without real justice everywhere, at all levels, without the dismantling of the antidemocratic mechanisms that were methodically put in place all these decades, any attempt to reinstate the rule of law and an actually democratic governance in Greece is doomed to fail.
But here, we the people must admit our own responsibility and fault. We must finally own our responsibility for the choices we make at the ballot, our responsibility for our withdrawal from the commons, our propensity to adopt a “live and let die” mentality, the mentality that drives us to vote for those who promise they’ll do this personal favor for us or the other, no matter how harmful to the greater good. We learned nothing from the Junta and the previous dictatorships Greece was saddled with; finally, we must state here that we have learned nothing from Poland’s misadventure, even though we should have understood very well that restoring democracy after a period during which it was eroded and hollowed out is far more difficult than creating it[2]. We must understand and accept our responsibilities, because the abyss is right in front of us.
Sources:
[1] Καθημερινή (2021). Οταν ο τέως βασιλιάς συνωμοτούσε για την «εξουδετέρωση του Καραμανλή». [online]. Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΗ. Available at: https://www.kathimerini.gr/politics/561437569/otan-o-teos-vasilias-synomotoyse-gia-tin-exoydeterosi-toy-karamanli/ [Accessed 24 Jul. 2024].
[2] Ash, T.G. (2024). The world should learn from Poland’s tragedy: restoring democracy is even harder than creating it. The Guardian. [online] 23 Jan. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/poland-restoring-democracy-harder-donald-tusk.
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