History, Aftermath of the Civil War

Wartime occupation and the civil war that followed devastated the Greek economy. However, Greece recovered quickly, and the 1950s ushered in a period of rapid economic and social development.

Greater political stability arrived with a change in the electoral system from proportional to simple majority representation. In 1952 the right-wing Greek Rally party won the election, and Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos became prime minister. Greece joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that year. A new constitution gave women the right to vote, and Papagos’s cabinet included Greece’s first female minister. After Papagos died in 1955, King Paul chose as his successor the relatively unknown Konstantinos Karamanlis, who was to dominate Greek political life for the next four decades. Karamanlis immediately dissolved the Greek Rally and founded his own party, the National Radical Union. The leadership and right-wing politics of the new party were essentially the same as those of the Greek Rally.

Much of Karamanlis’s first prime ministership was overshadowed by an increasingly bitter conflict over Cyprus, an island south of Turkey that had been administered by Britain since 1878. Greeks constituted about 80 percent of Cyprus’s population; the rest of the island’s inhabitants were Turkish. From the time Britain acquired control of Cyprus, most Greek Cypriots had advocated enosis, or union with Greece. However, Britain considered Cyprus crucial to its oil supply lines from the Middle East and refused to agree to the union. In 1959 Britain, Greece, and Turkey (which put itself forward as the protector of the Turkish Cypriot minority) reached an agreement that the island would become an independent republic within the British Commonwealth. Cyprus’s independence was proclaimed in 1960. However, an elaborate power-sharing agreement between the Greek and Turkish communities on the island soon broke down in violence.

By the time of the 1958 election, the popularity of Karamanlis’s National Radical Union government had begun to slip. After the party lost seats that year, Karamanlis asked for early elections in 1961, and his party received 51 percent of the vote. Karamanlis pursued his goal of closer relations with Western Europe by securing associate membership for Greece in the European Community in 1962. However, allegations that the 1961 election had been manipulated soured the political climate. Georgios Papandreou, who had been able to unify the centrist political forces into the Center Union party in 1961, fought a vigorous campaign to reverse the result of the election. In this effort he was able to exploit a growing resentment toward autocratic policies instituted by the government since the civil war years. Karamanlis, who had clashed with King Paul and his strong-willed, German-born wife, Frederika, resigned in 1963. In the February 1964 elections, Papandreou’s Center Union party won a clear majority.