strength of those in power, in order to preserve power or prevent their opponents from winning the elections.
The genius of the electoral laws was and is using certain provisions so that the majority of the people vote for one party, only for others to govern in the end.
Of course, because you reap what you sow, the implementation of the law has often had the opposite effect that what those in power aim for.
The elections in 1956 and 1958 are characteristic examples of this. In the first case, the right-wing National Radical Union (ERE) which was in power under Konstantinos Karamanlis, managed to secure more than its share of seats in Parliament, leaving the Democratic Union in second place despite having received more votes!!
If, based on the aforementioned, the elections were successfully rigged in 1956, the same can’t be said about the subsequent elections in 1958. After much political turmoil, the governing ERE voted for an electoral law in such a way so that the first party would form a government and the second would “steal” from the third. The luminaries believed that they could eliminate the Left by helping Karamanlis come first and supporting the Liberal Party (under Georgios Papandreou and Sophocles Venizelos).
The voters however punished them. The United Democratic Left (EDA) came second in the elections and became the main opposition in Parliament. The change in the electoral law that followed was carried out to limit the electoral strength of the Left.
Those in power combined the new electoral system with the infamous violence and rigging in 1961, which in turn resulted in the catastrophic for the country Apostasy of 1965 and the criminal dictatorship of 1967.
Since then a voting system of reinforced proportional representation has been implemented, which at first appeared the suit the two top parties to take turns in power. The first attempt to change the public will took place in the 1989 elections, with the Tsohatzopoulos electoral law that did not give the parliamentary majority to that party that came first with 47% of the vote! (It took three elections by April 1990 for the first party to win 150 seats in Parliament with 47%!)
Eventually the “plus 50” system was discovered, which gave the first party a 50-seat bonus.
Of course those who expect to come first in the elections like it and it does not suit the small parties. The Constitution prevents the electoral from changing as a result of under-the-table political dealings by stating that any changes to the law are applied in the next-but-one election. For the electoral system to change and be applied immediately in the next elections, a parliamentary supermajority of at least 200 votes is needed.
The “bargaining” of course has begun…
Stavros P. Psycharis
Originally published in the Sunday print edition
