How Greece governs itself after the colonels fell

What the constitution settled for good

The Greek constitution dates from 1975, written in the year after a military dictatorship that had run since 1967 collapsed, and revised several times since, most substantially in 2008. It replaced a constitutional order that had alternated between monarchy and republic for a century and a half, and the first thing it does is close that question.

Article 110 makes the closure explicit. Most of the constitution may be revised, but a short list of provisions may not, and the first of them is the one determining the form of government as a parliamentary republic. Also unamendable are the clauses on human dignity, equality before the law, personal liberty, freedom of religious conscience and the separation of powers. A country that had spent a century arguing about whether to have a king wrote the answer into the part of the text that cannot be changed.

The revision procedure for everything else is deliberately slow. Fifty members must propose it, parliament must resolve on it by a three-fifths majority in two ballots at least a month apart, and the next parliament decides in its opening session which provisions to revise. No revision may begin within five years of the completion of a previous one, so constitutional change in Greece takes at minimum one full electoral cycle.

How parliament is elected

Parliament has one chamber. Its size is set by statute within constitutional limits of not fewer than two hundred and not more than three hundred members, and it has been three hundred throughout the modern period. Members serve four consecutive years from the day of the general election.

The electoral system is a reinforced proportional one, and the reinforcement is the point. A party must clear a threshold of 3% of the national vote to win any seats at all, which suppresses splinter parties. The largest party then receives a bonus on a sliding scale: twenty extra seats once it reaches 25% of the vote, and one further seat for every additional half a per cent, to a maximum bonus of fifty seats out of three hundred.

The design produces single-party majorities from vote shares well below half, which is exactly what it was built to do, in a country whose post-war politics had been unstable. The electoral law can be changed by a simple parliamentary majority, but a law changed that way does not take effect for two election cycles unless it passes by a two-thirds majority, which stops a governing party from rewriting the rules for the election it is about to fight.

Why the presidency once dissolved parliaments

Parliament elects the president rather than the voters do, in a special sitting called at least a month before the incumbent's term ends. Election requires a two-thirds majority of all members. If that majority is not reached, the ballot is repeated after five days, and if a third ballot also fails to produce the required qualified majority, parliament is dissolved within ten days and a general election is called.

That clause turned a ceremonial appointment into a mechanism capable of bringing down a parliament, and it did so more than once. A governing party without the numbers to elect a president faced an election it had not chosen, which made the presidential succession a live political crisis at intervals of five years. The rule was relaxed by later revision, but the principle that the head of state is chosen by the legislature and not by the electorate remains.

What the office holds is small. The president appoints the prime minister and, on the prime minister's recommendation, the other ministers, and formally dissolves parliament. Executive power belongs to the government. The president must promulgate and publish statutes passed by parliament within one month of the vote, and within that month may send a bill back with reasons, which is a delay rather than a veto. The constitution names the president commander in chief of the armed forces and then states that the command is exercised by the government, which is the pattern of the whole office in one sentence: the title is held in one place and the power in another.

How a government is formed when nobody wins

Article 37 sets out a sequence that runs automatically. The leader of the party holding an absolute majority of seats is appointed prime minister. If no party has one, the president gives an exploratory mandate to the leader of the party with the largest number of seats, to establish whether a government commanding confidence can be formed.

If that fails, the mandate passes to the leader of the second largest party, and then to the third. Each exploratory mandate lasts three days. Where parties hold equal numbers of seats, the one with more votes goes first, and a newly formed parliamentary group follows an older one of the same size. If all the mandates are exhausted, the process moves to the formation of a caretaker government and a fresh election.

Underlying all of it is the principle Greek politics calls dedilomeni, the declared confidence of parliament. The government must request a vote of confidence within fifteen days of the prime minister being sworn in, and may seek one at any time thereafter, and parliament may withdraw it, in which case the president relieves the cabinet of its duties and the sequence in Article 37 begins again.

How the party system has behaved

The reinforced system was built for a specific problem, and for four decades it solved it. From the restoration of democracy until the debt crisis, two large parties alternated in office, each able to convert a plurality into a working majority, and coalition government was the exception rather than the rule.

The crisis broke that pattern. Between 2009 and 2015 the vote fragmented, the two established parties lost most of their support, new parties entered parliament at both ends of the spectrum, and the country held elections in quick succession while the exploratory mandate sequence in Article 37 ran to its end more than once. The system designed to manufacture majorities produced parliaments in which no combination could form a government, which is precisely the case the constitutional sequence exists for.

What followed was a period of coalition government, then a return to single-party majorities as the vote reconsolidated. The lesson usually drawn is that the electoral bonus manufactures stability out of a stable party system and cannot create one out of a fragmented electorate.

The two-cycle rule on electoral law is the other half of that story. Because a change passed by simple majority does not take effect for two elections, governments have repeatedly legislated systems that would first apply to their successors, and the size of the bonus has moved up and down accordingly. Greek electoral law is therefore usually one reform behind the parliament that passed it.

Who decides whether a law is constitutional

Greece has no single constitutional court. Review is diffuse: any court may decline to apply a statute it finds contrary to the constitution, which spreads constitutional adjudication across the whole judiciary rather than concentrating it.

Three supreme courts sit at the top of three separate branches. The Supreme Administrative Court, the Council of State, heads administrative justice. The Supreme Civil and Criminal Court, the Areios Pagos, heads the ordinary courts. The Court of Audit supervises public expenditure. Where a section or chamber of any of the three finds a statutory provision contrary to the constitution, it must refer the question to the full bench of that court unless the point has already been decided.

Above them sits a body designed for the collisions that arrangement produces. The Special Highest Court resolves conflicts between the three supreme courts on the constitutionality of a statute, along with election disputes and questions about the interpretation of international law. It is convened for particular cases rather than sitting permanently, which is a good description of what a system of diffuse review needs from a final arbiter: not a standing constitutional court that takes the question away from the ordinary judges, but a body that meets when they have disagreed and settles which of them was right.

What the constitution says about religion

Article 3 states that the prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ, that the Orthodox Church of Greece acknowledges Jesus Christ as its head, and that it is united in doctrine with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. No other European constitution names a church in quite these terms.

The word chosen is prevailing rather than official, and the distinction does work. The constitution requires that ministers of all known religions be subject to the same state supervision and the same obligations towards the state as those of the prevailing religion, so the framework treats religions equally in law while naming one as prevailing in fact.

In practice this produces a relationship in which the church has a formal presence at public occasions, the state pays clergy salaries, and religious education has a place in schools, alongside constitutional guarantees of freedom of religious conscience that the unamendable list in Article 110 protects. The tension between those two things is the substance of most Greek argument about the church: the guarantees are absolute and unamendable, and the naming of a prevailing religion sits three articles away from them in the same document. The arrangement has been argued about continuously and revised at the edges rather than at the centre. Greece: culture deals with what the church does in ordinary life, and Greece: history how it came to occupy that position.

Where power sits below the state

Greece is a unitary state and its local government has been reorganised twice in living memory, each time by amalgamation. The country runs on regions and municipalities, with the regions responsible for planning, regional development and parts of transport, and the municipalities for the services closest to residents.

The reorganisations reduced a very fragmented map. A country of mountains and islands accumulated a large number of tiny communes, each with a council and an office, and successive reforms merged them into fewer and larger units in pursuit of administrative capacity. The complaint made against every such reform is the one made everywhere: that a village amalgamated into a larger municipality loses the only public body that was ever within walking distance of it.

The islands complicate the arithmetic in a way that has no equivalent on a continental map. An authority may be responsible for inhabited islands hours apart by boat, with services that cannot be centralised because there is water between the parts, and with winter populations a fraction of the summer ones. Administrative rules written for a mainland municipality do not transfer cleanly, and the cost per resident of running a small island is far above the national average. Greece: geography takes up the archipelago that produces this.