# Metapolitefsi *Μεταπολίτευση* — "regime change," the Greek term for the transition that began when Constantine Karamanlis landed in Athens on **24 July 1974** and the era it opened. Greece's transition is worth studying because it did almost everything the transitology literature recommends, and it still ended in 2012 with the party system disintegrating. ## What It Did, Fast - **Legalized the Communist Party** in September 1974, after twenty-seven years of proscription. The winning side of the [[Greek Civil War]] legalized the losing side within two months of the dictatorship falling. - **Abolished the monarchy** by referendum on 8 December 1974 — **69% for a republic** — settling a question that had destabilized Greek politics for sixty years, by vote rather than by decree. - **Prosecuted the junta** within a year: high treason convictions, life sentences, and the first torture prosecutions since Nuremberg. See [[Greek Junta]]. - **Wrote a new constitution** in 1975. - **Joined the European Community** in 1981, explicitly as a democratic anchor. **Speed is the variable.** Greece tried its dictators while the evidence was fresh and the public wanted it, and did not trade justice for stability — the bargain Spain made in the same decade with the *pacto del olvido*. Greece got both. ## What It Also Did The metapolitefsi produced a two-party system — Karamanlis's **New Democracy** and Andreas Papandreou's **PASOK**, which took power in 1981 — that governed for over thirty years and built its stability on distribution: public-sector employment, clientelist appointment, and debt. By the 2000s the arrangement depended on borrowing that a shared currency made cheap and a sovereign state could not devalue its way out of. When that ended, so did the party system: see [[Greek Debt Crisis]]. > [!warning] The finding > **A transition can be exemplary in its transitional justice and still fail forty years later on its economic settlement.** Greece is the counter-example to the assumption that democracies are lost the way they were won. Nothing that happened in 2012 was a return of the junta or a failure to punish it. **The metapolitefsi's institutions held; its bargain did not** — and it was the bargain, not the constitution, that the crisis destroyed. ## See Also - [[Greek Junta]] · [[Greek Civil War]] · [[Greek Debt Crisis]] · [[Greek History Hub]] - [[Democracy]] · [[Democratic Backsliding]] · [[European Union]]