Greek constitutional amendment of 1986

The Greek Constitutional amendment of 1986 was proposed in order to limit the powers of the President of the Republic. It was part of a political gamble by Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, who suddenly declared not to support Constantine Karamanlis for a second term as President of the Republic, proposed constitutional amendments designed to increase further the power of his position, and effectively removing any checks and balances against the powerful executive branch.

Eleven articles were amended, primarily targeting the responsibilities of the President of the Republic, and a vote was passed transposing the text of the Constitution into demotic Greek. These amendments transformed the liberal democracy of Greece based on the constitution of 1975 into a 'populist democracy' with a majoritarian parliamentary system and a prime minister acting as a "parliamentary autocrat." Despite the political and constitutional crisis that emerged in constitutional procedures in electing Sartzetakis, the revised Constitution of 1975/1986 was accepted by all political powers only after the polarized 1985 Greek parliamentary election.

Background

Further information: Greek constitutional crisis of 1985

First stage

Presidents of the Hellenic Republic, Konstantinos Karamanlis (left) and Christos Sartzetakis (right).

On 6 March 1985, New Democracy announced that they would support Karamanlis' second Presidency term, while on the same day, the KKE party declared that they would put forward their candidate. The press anticipated that Papandreou would also support Karamanlis, since he had assured Karamanlis his support in person. However, Papandreou changed his mind at the last moment, siding with the left wing of PASOK, which did not want Karamanlis, and instead backed Christos Sartzetakis (a Supreme Court of Greece judge known for his principled handling of the 1963 murder of left-wing deputy Grigoris Lambrakis and viewed favorably by the left, and a protagonist in Costas Gavras' 1969 movie "Z" based on the novel of Vassilis Vassilikos). The announcement occurred at the Central Committee of PASOK on 9 March. This move surprised some of Papanderou's ministers, much of his party's rank-and-file, and even Sartzetakis himself, who was not consulted in advance. Later on, it was revealed that the supposedly spontaneous change of mind was to camouflage Papandreou's long-held constitutional designs since Sartzetakis not only knew about it well in advance but also that there had been two other judicial figures who rejected Papandreou's offer. At the same time, Papandreou announced plans for a constitutional reform, which rekindled the debate about the form of the republic and further polarized the political environment by damaging the consensus between the two dominant political parties, PASOK and New Democracy, that existed between 1981 and 1985.

Papandreou also argued that it would be illogical for Karamanlis to preside over any constitutional reform since much of the constitution of 1974 was heavily influenced by Karamanlis himself. Mitsotakis accused Papandreou of creating a constitutional crisis to remove Karamanlis from office to establish a totalitarian constitution. Papandreou informed Karamanlis of his decision via his deputy, Antonios Livanis, as he could not bring himself to do so in person. In response, Karamanlis resigned from the Presidency on 10 March 1985, two weeks before the termination of his term, and was replaced by PASOK's Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament, Ioannis Alevras, as acting president.

Parliamentary votes for president & colored ballots

Further information: 1985 Greek presidential election

Sartzetakis was elected president by the Hellenic Parliament in a tense and confrontational atmosphere due to constitutionally questionable procedures initiated by Papandreou. The opposition, New Democracy led by Constantine Mitsotakis and Karamanlis' former party, deemed the vote illegal, with Mitsotakis threatening to remove Sartzetakis from the presidency if they won the upcoming elections, intensifying the constitutional crisis.

Constitutional proposals & debate

In contrast with the constitutional violations raised in Sartzetakis's election, PASOK's procedure in proposing constitutional amendments was under the constitution. However, the surprising announcement of constitutional reform under already tense political conditions and the limited input from constitutional scholars on the nature of amendments increased the possibility of the crisis becoming widespread. Andreas Papandreou's proposals were designed to ease future changes to the constitution in Article 110, required amendments to be approved by a parliamentary majority in one rather than two successive parliaments and reducing the powers of the President. While the former proposal was eventually abandoned due to its controversial nature, Papandreou was determined to eliminate the presidential powers. His argument was the hypothetical case of an activist president, mimicking the tendency of kings of Greece to intervene in the political life since the creation of the modern Greek state. PASOK minister Anastasios Peponis introduced the constitutional amendment package to the Parliament with the following argument:

Invoking the lack of use of some provisions, their lack of implementation is by no means an argument to keep them in the current constitution. The question is what is our guiding principle? When provisions directly or indirectly contradict the principle of popular sovereignty, we object to them. [...] We support that the president is neither directly appointed by nor elected by the people. We are not a presidential, we are a parliamentary democracy. It is not the president who resorts to the people, so that the people deliver a verdict by majority voting. It is the legitimate government. It is the political parties. If the president resorts to the people, then he inevitably either sides with one party against others or attempts to substitute himself for the parties and impose his own solution. Nevertheless, as soon as he attempts to substitute himself for the parties and impose his own solution, then he embarks upon the formation of his own decisions of governmental nature. Then the government, directly or indirectly, fully or partially, is abolished.

Scholars considered such constitutional changes "unnecessary" since no president had utilized these powers in the course of the Third Hellenic Republic until the time Papandreou raised the issue. Moreover, Anna Benaki-Psarouda, New Democracy's rapporteur, presented in the parliament the following argument against the proposed reforms:

And this is the achievement of the 1975 Constitution: A miraculous balance between the Parliament, the Government and the President of the Republic, namely these state organs which express popular sovereignty and always pose the risk of de facto usurping it. [...] It is also interesting to see where these competencies of the President of the Republic are transferred. They are removed from him, but where do they go? To popular sovereignty and the Parliament, as the parliamentary majority claims? Dear colleagues, all of them go to the government, either directly or indirectly through the parliamentary majority controlled by it. Because the parliament is now subjugated to the parliamentary majority through party discipline. [...] Dear colleagues, the conclusion from the amendments suggested by the government or the parliamentary majority is the following: Power is transferred completely to the government. Hence, we have every reason to be afraid and suspect and mistrust about the future of Greece. [...] I want to stress the following, so that we, the Greek people, understand well: that with the suggested amendments you turn government and government majority into superpowers.

Psarouda-Benaki effectively argued that this type of majoritarianism would damage the quality of Greek democracy. Scholars also noted that the proposed changes would make the prime minister the most powerful ("autocratic") position in the Greek state since there would not be any constitutional restraints.

Aftermath

Further information: 1985 Greek parliamentary election

Both parties continued their confrontations in the campaigns for the June 1985 parliamentary election, where the political polarization reached new heights. Mitsotakis declared, "In voting, the Greek people will also be voting for a president" and also warned that there is a danger of sliding towards an authoritarian one-party state. The president's office responded, "The president of the republic will remain the vigilant guardian of the constitution." From PASOK, Agamemnon Koutsogiorgas described what was at stake not as "oranges and tomatoes but the confrontation between two worlds." Papandreou followed this by characterizing the upcoming elections as a fight between light and darkness in his rallies, implying that PASOK represented the "forces of light" since its logo was a rising sun. Papandreou further argued that every vote against PASOK was a vote for the return of the Right with the slogan "Vote PASOK to prevent a return of the right." The communists, persecuted by the Right in the 1950s, protested against Papandreou's dwelling on the past, pointing out that the 1980s were not the same as the 1950s. The Economist magazine described Greece as a "country divided," tearing itself apart and opening the wounds of civil war. Just before the elections, Karamanlis broke his silence and urged the Greeks to be cautious with their vote (without explicitly advising who to vote), commenting that PASOK had brought "confusion and uncertainty." However, Karamanlis' statement was not broadcast on TV and radio, which were controlled by the state and governing party, i.e., PASOK.

In the event, PASOK was re-elected with 45.82% of the vote, losing approximately 2.3% from 1981, while New Democracy increased its share of the vote by 4.98% to 40.84%. Papandreou's gamble worked to his benefit because he gained from far-left voting blocks covering the losses from the centrist voters, and appealed to socialist voters who rejected Karamanlis's perceived hindrance of PASOK's policies. Papandreou had the upper hand over Mitsotakis in which he argued that a vote for Mitsotakis is a vote for a constitutional anomaly, convincing a significant fraction of Greek voters. Richard Clogg states that the large-scale rally by Mitsotakis on 2 June at Syntagma Square may have panicked communists to vote for PASOK; the communist parties lost a significant share of the vote.

After the election results, Mitsotakis accepted Sartzetakis as president and the head of the state. Papandreou's constitutional proposals took effect in 1986.

Scholarly assessment

Contemporary constitutional scholar Aristovoulos Manesis provided in 1989 a detailed assessment of the constitutional crisis as follows. While the constitutional revision of 1985 did not lead to or be the result of a violent confrontation as it happened in the revisions of 1911 with the Goudi coup, in 1952 after the civil war, and in 1975 after the Junta, the commonality between all these constitutional revisions was that they were imposed by the political party in power without the particiapation or consent of the minority. He also argued that the manner in which the presidential election was announced and conducted and the nature of the constitutional amendments had the potential of political rupture, while the latter also decreased the Constitution's democratic character due to the concentration of power in the prime minister's position along with the emerging statist bureaucracies and technologies aimed at controlling the popular will. At the end of his criticism, he advocated for strengthening individual rights and institutions as a counterweight to the executive branch led by the prime minister.

While Papandreou contended that Karamanlis' removal was necessary for the constitutional revision, Manesis argued the reverse: the constitutional revision was merely a pretext to justify the removal of Karamanlis, which would remind left-leaning voters as the elections were approaching that PASOK remained faithful to its revolutionary left-wing origins. Stathis Kalyvas, a political scientist, and Richard Clogg, a historian, note that while the actions by Papandreou did not directly threaten the democratic form of the Constitution, however, they undermined its long-term legitimacy. Takis Pappas, a political scientist, considered the events surrounding Sartzetakis's election as part of PASOK's strategy in the 1980s to "state grabbing" and to bend or even disregard liberal institutions to the will of popular sovereignty that gradually transformed Greece from a liberal democracy based on the Constitution of 1975 into a "populist democracy." Historians John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis suggested that the crisis was motivated by Papandreou's desire to divert the Greek electorate's attention away from the worsening state of the Greek economy (unemployment increased under PASOK from 2.7% in 1980 to 7.8% in 1985, annual inflation of the order of 20%, widening trade deficits).

Political scientist Dimitrios Katsoudas wrote that the constitutional revision was unnecessary and damaged the established legality of the Constitution and opined that Papandreou had long-term constitutional designs to reinforce his government party against an impotent parliament. In the end, he notes that the constitutional revision could be viewed positively, as despite any merits of the existence of a pole of power checking the government, such a pole of power "is certainly not an orthodox component of the parliamentary system" and argues that the revision restored in modernised form the parliamentary system that had governed Greece democratically since 1864 with only 11 years of dictatorial rule.

References

Constitutions of Greece

• "Greek Constitution of 1975". Government Gazette (Greece) ΦΕΚ A 111/1975 (in Greek). National Printing Office.
• "Greek Constitution of 1986". Government Gazette (Greece) ΦΕΚ A 23/1986 (in Greek). National Printing Office.

Books

• Carabott, Philip; Sfikas, Thanassis D., eds. (2004). The Greek Civil War: essays on a conflict of exceptionalism and silences. Surrey: Ashgate. ISBN 9780754641322.
• Clogg, Richard (1987). Parties and elections in Greece: the search for legitimacy. North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 0822307944.
• ——————, ed. (1993). Greece, 1981–89: The Populist Decade. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781349230563.
  • Alivizatos, Nikos C. "The Presidency, Parliament and the Courts in the 1980s". In Clogg (1993), pp. 65-77.
• —————— (2013). A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107656444.
• Featherstone, Kevin; Katsoudas, Dimitrios K., eds. (1987). Political change in Greece: Before and after the colonels. London & New York: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781000992144.
  • Katsoudas, Dimitrios K. "The Constitutional framework". In Featherstone & Katsoudas (1987), pp. 14-33.
• ——————; Papadimitriou, Dimitris (2015). Prime Ministers in Greece, The Paradox of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198717171.
• Γρηγοριάδης, Ιωάννης N., ed. (2017). Democratic transition and the rise of Populist Majoritarianism: Constitutional Reform in Greece and Turkey. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783319575551.
  • Grigoriadis, Ioannis N. "The Rising Tide of Populist Majoritarianism in Greece". In Γρηγοριάδης (2017), pp. 14-33.
• Koliopoulos, John S.; Veremis, Thanos M. [in Greek] (2009). Modern Greece A History Since 1821. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781444314830.
• Manesis, Aristovoulos (1989). Η συνταγματική αναθεώρηση του 1986 [Constitutional resivion of 1986] (in Greek). Athens: Παρατηρητής. ISBN 9789602603543.
• Pappas, Takis (2014). Populism and crisis politics in Greece (in Greek). Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137410580.
• Pridham, Geoffrey, ed. (1990). Securing Democracy, Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415023269.
  • Featherstone, Kevin. "Political Parties and democratic consolidation in Greece". In Pridham (1990), pp. 179–202.

Journals

• Clogg, Richard (1985). "The 1985 Constitutional Crisis in Greece". The Journal of Modern Hellenism. 2 (1): 103–112.
• Kalyvas, Stathis N. (1997). "Polarization in Greek Politics: PASOK's First Four Years, 1981-1985". Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. 23 (1): 83–104.
• McDonald, Robert (1985). "Greece after PASOK's Victory". The World Today. 41 (7): 133–136. JSTOR 40395748.
• Samatas, Minas (1993). "The Populist Phase of an Underdeveloped Surveillance Society: Political Surveillance in Post-Dictatorial Greece". Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. 19 (1): 31–70.

Web and other sources

• "Greece's unemployment (%)". International Monetary Fund.
• "Greece's inflation rate (%)". International Monetary Fund.