Constantine Karamanlis
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Constantine Karamanlis (Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής in Greek; March 8 1907 - April 23 1998) was a towering figure of Greek politics.
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Early life
He was born in the town of Küpköy, Macedonia, Ottoman Empire (now Proti (Πρώτη), Macedonia, Greece). He became a Greek citizen in 1913, after Macedonia was liberated in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War. His father was Georgios Karamanlis, a teacher who fought during the national struggle of the Greeks in Macedonia, in 1904-1908. After spending his childhood in Macedonia, he went to Athens to attain his degree in Law. He practiced law in Serres, entered politics with the conservative People's Party (Laikon Komma) and was elected Member of Parliament for the first time at the age of 28, in the last elections held before World War II. Due to health problems, Karamanlis did not participate in the Greco-Italian War.
First Premiership
After World War II, Karamanlis quickly rose through the ranks of Greek politics. His rise was strongly supported by fellow party-member and close friend Lampros Eutaxias who served as Minister of Agriculture under the premiership of Konstantinos Tsaldaris. Karamanlis's first cabinet position was Minister of Employment in 1947 under the same administration. Karamanlis eventually become Minister of Public Works in the Greek Rally (Hellenikos Synagermos) administration under Prime Minister Alexander Papagos. He won the admiration of the U.S. Embassy for the efficiency with which he built road infrastructure and administered American aid programs.1
When Papagos died after a brief illness, U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy counseled King Paul of Greece to appoint the young Karamanlis as Prime Mininster.2 The King did so, thus bypassing Stephanos Stephanopoulos and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, the two senior Synagermos politicians who were widely considered as the heavyweights most likely to succeed Papagos. Karamanlis first became prime minister in 1955, and reorganized the Greek Rally as the National Radical Union (Ethnike Rizospastike Enosis). He won solid majorities in three successive elections (1956, 1958 and 1961).
In 1959 he announced a five-year plan (1960–64) for the Greek economy, emphasizing improvement of agricultural and industrial production, heavy investment on infrastructure and the promotion of tourism. On the international front, Karamanlis abandoned the government's previous strategic goal for enosis (the unification of Greece and Cyprus) in favor of independence for Cyprus. In 1958, his government engaged in negotiations with the United Kingdom and Turkey, which culminated in the Zurich Agreement as a basis for a deal on the independence of Cyprus. In 1959 the plan was ratified in London by Makarios III.
The Merten affair
Max Merten was Kriegverwaltungsrat (military administration counselor) of the Nazi occupation forces in Thessaloniki. He was convicted in Greece as a war criminal in 1959, but was granted amnesty and released to the Federal Republic of Germany shortly thereafter.
On September 28, 1960, German newspapers Hamburger Echo and Der Spiegel published excerpts of Merten's deposition to the German authorities according to which Karamanlis and Minister of the Interior Takos Makris were informers during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Merten claimed that Karamanlis and Makris were rewarded for their services with a business in Thessaloniki which belonged to a Greek Jew sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Karamanlis rejected the accusations as unsubstantiated and absurd, presented evidence that Merten had tried to extort money from him prior to making his statements, and charged the opposition party for instigating them. The affair remained at the center of political discussions until early 1961, and resulted in tension between Karamanlis and King Paul of Greece.
Self-Exile
During the elections of 29 October, 1961, ERE won 50.80% of popular vote. On October 31, George Papandreou stated that the electoral results were due to widespread vote-rigging and fraud. Karamanlis replied electoral fraud, to the extent that it happened, was masterminded by the Palace. Political tension escalated, as Papandreou refused to recognize the Karamanlis government. On November 14, 1961 he waged a "unrelenting struggle" ("ανένδοτο αγώνα") against Karamanlis.
Tension between Karamanlis and the Palace escalated even further as Karamanlis vetoed fundraising initiatives undertaken by Queen Frederika. On June 17, 1963, Karamanlis resigned the premiership after a disagreement with King Paul of Greece, and spent four months abroad. In the meantime the country was in turmoil following the assassination of Dr. Gregoris Lambrakis, a leftist member of Parliament, by right-wing extremists during a pro-peace demonstration in Thessaloniki. The opposition parties castigated Karamanlis as a moral accomplice to the assassination.
In November the National Radical Union (ERE), under his leadership, was defeated by the Center Union under George Papandreou in the general election. Disappointed with the result, Karamanlis fled Greece under the name Triantafyllides. He spent the next 11 years in self-imposed exile in Paris, France. Karamanlis was succeeded by Panagiotis Kanellopoulos as the ERE leader.
In 1966, Constantine II of Greece sent his envoy Demetrios Bitsios to Paris on mission to convince Karamanlis to return to Greece and resume a role in Greek politics. According to the former monarch, Karamanlis replied that he would return under the condition that the King were to wage martial law, as was his constitutional prerogative.3 Neither occurred, and constitutional order was eventually usurped on April 21 1967 by a coup d'état led by Syntagmatarkhis George Papadopoulos.
Second Premiership
Throughout his exile in France, Karamanlis was a vocal opponent of the Régime of the Colonels, the military junta that seized power in Greece in April 1967. After the fall of the dictatorship in July 1974 and backed by a huge wave of public support, 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 became the Prime Minister of a national unity government.
Despite being faced with an inherently unstable and dangerous political situation, which forced him to sleep aboard a yacht watched over by a destroyer for several weeks after his return, Karamanlis moved swiftly to defuse the tension between Greece and Turkey, which were on the brink of war over the Cyprus crisis, and begin the steadfast process of transition from military rule to a pluralist democracy.
During this period, referred to as the metapoliteusis (Greek: Μεταπολίτευσις, which means change of Régime), Karamanlis legalized the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), adopted a measured approach to removing collaborators and appointees of the dictatorship, and, wanting to legitimize his authority, declared that elections would be held in November 1974, a mere four months after the collapse of the Régime of the Colonels.
In those elections, Karamanlis with his newly formed conservative party, New Democracy (Greek: Νέα Δημοκρατία, Nea Dhimokratia) 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 penalties for high treason and mutiny that were mitigated to life incarceration) and the writing of the 1975 constitution.
In 1977, New Democracy again won the elections, and Karamanlis continued to serve as Prime Minister until 1980.
First and Second Presidency
Following his signing of the Accession Treaty with the European Economic Community in 1980, Karamanlis relinquished the Premiership and elevated himself to the Presidency, and served until 1985, before being succeeded by Christos Sartzetakis. In 1981 Karamanlis oversaw Greece's entry into the European Community (now the European Union).
In 1990 he was re-elected President by a conservative parliamentary majority (under the conservative government of then Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis) and served until 1995, when he was succeeded by Kostis Stephanopoulos.
Legacy
Image:Karamanlis3.jpg
Karamanlis retired in 1995, at the age of 88, having won 5 parliamentary elections, and having spent 14 years as Prime Minister, 10 years as President of the Republic, and a total of more than sixty years in active politics. For his long service to democracy and the European cause Karamanlis was awarded the Karlspreis in 1978. He died after a short illness in 1998, at the age of 91. He bequeathed his archives to the Constantine Karamanlis Foundation, a conservative think tank he had founded and endowed.
His nephew Kostas Karamanlis is now the leader of the New Democracy party (Nea Demokratia), and Prime Minister as of March 7, 2004.
Karamanlis has been praised for presiding over an early period of fast economic growth for Greece (1957-61) and for supporting the membership of Greece with the emerging economic community of European nations that eventually became the European Union. His supporters came to laud him as the charismatic Ethnarches (National Leader). Some of his left-wing opponents have accused him of condoning of a "para-state" comprising rightist anti-communist groups, whose members undertook Via kai Notheia (Violence and Corruption), i.e., fraud during the electoral constests between ERE and Papandreou's Center Union party. Some of his conservative opponents have criticized his socialist economic policies during the 1970s, which included the nationalization of Olympic Airways and Emporiki Bank. Karamanlis has also been criticized for his management of the Cyprus crisis in 1974. Most agree, however, that Karamanlis successfully orchestrated the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy in 1974.
Endnotes
- Laurence Stern, The Wrong Horse, (1977) p.17.
- Ibid. p.17.
- Alexis Papachelas, "Constantine Speaks", TO BHMA, January 29 2006.
See also
Template:Start box Template:Succession box Template:Succession box Template:Succession box Template:Succession box Template:Succession box Template:Succession box Template:End boxbg:Константинос Г. Караманлис de:Konstantinos Karamanlis el:Κωνσταντίνος Γ. Καραμανλής es:Constantinos Karamanlis fr:Constantin Caramanlis ja:コンスタンディノス・カラマンリス nl:Konstantinos Karamanlis pt:Konstantínos Karamanlís zh:康斯坦丁·卡拉曼利斯