It has been more than 40 years since the restoration of democracy in Greece, and a peculiar prosperity, which was consciously cultivated by the leaders of political and economic elites, was promoted before the onset of the financial crisis. However, from the beginning of the financial recession, the temporal illusions have been revealed and the need for a complete transformation of the financial policies has been expressed, while a significant transformation of the entire political culture has started. Parties such as SYRIZA, Independent Greeks (ANEL) and Golden Dawn took advantage of the growing social discontent by propagating themselves as champions of ordinary people and of their concerns or their fears, as the expression of resistance against an avoidable sellout of public values. However, the crisis has exposed a number of truths which were elaborately hiding in the underbelly of the detaining political and socioeconomic system. These truths were exteriorized once it became clear that the foundations on which the Greek society was based after the restoration of democracy, were weak and insufficient to guide the country’s way towards a modern future.

There is a vast literature about the ‘political change’ (metapolitefsi) in Greece after 1974 and the restoration of democracy, but a few are wondering about its main characteristics. This paper tries to define this political change as the transition from a long period of entrenched parliamentarism, which resulted in a brutal dictatorship, to a modern constitutional democracy. In other words, it is the obvious transition to the European system of guaranteed rights and freedoms and of a structured charter of obligations. Actually, it is the transition from ‘Balkan provincialism’ to a modern but limited Europeanization. In philosophical terms, it can be called the transition from the regime’s obscurantism, from arbitrary insolence of power and uncontrolled state authoritarianism, to a free evolutionary period.

Political Change in Greece