Yes to the Prospect of Allagi

By Henry Muller

Turning left, the voters follow a charmer called Andreas

With parades, wreath-laying ceremonies and special Masses, Greeks this week will mark Ohi Day, one of their proudest national celebrations. It commemorates the day in 1940 when the government replied ohi (no) to Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini's ultimatum to allow his troops to occupy strategic points on Greek territory. Yet for a majority of Greeks Ohi Day came somewhat earlier this year. In a landslide election that brought to power the country's first socialist government, Greeks last week not only said ohi to the conservative New Democracy party, which has ruled for the past seven years, but they also delivered a cryptic "maybe" to the U.S. and to two organizations of which Greece is a member: NATO and the European Community.

The man who caused concern in Western capitals with his spectacular victory and his nationalistic platform was Andreas Papandreou, 62, who, ironically enough, is a former U.S. citizen. Leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), Papandreou moved into the cavernous, wood-paneled Prime Minister's office occupied by his more moderate father George, who headed three governments between 1944 and 1965. With 48.6% of the vote to New Democracy's 35.9%, PASOK won a majority of 172 seats in the 300-member parliament. In a nearly symmetrical reversal of fortunes, New Democracy, led by outgoing Prime Minister George Rallis, fell from 172 seats to 115. Andreas, as the fiery winner is customarily called by his countrymen, was exuberant. "Change is necessary for the survival of the Greek nation," he declared in a victory speech. "We will make change tangible; it will show its face without delay."

That was precisely what worried many Americans and Western Europeans. Though Papandreou softened some of his more radical proposals in the past year, he has spoken out against the presence of four U.S. military bases in Greece, questioned Greek membership in NATO and opposed his country's membership in the ten-nation European Community. For those who hope Papandreou's actions in office will be more cautious than his campaign rhetoric, his election-night speech contained an encouraging message. Said he: "We will not lead the country into any adventure."

That attitude, together with the selection of moderates for his Cabinet, inspired a hopeful response from Washington. "It's wait and see," said one State Department official. "We are cooling it. We are not about to cast the first stone." Europeans were equally cautious in their analysis. Noted one senior British diplomat: "The trend in almost all European countries is for a new leader, whether of the left or the right, to dilute the more radical policy pronouncements of his election manifesto and resort to good old pragmatism."

Papandreou's first interview after being sworn in confirmed that he might not be the firebrand in office that he was in opposition (see box). Rather than close down U.S. bases immediately, he appears content to open negotiations on the question. Instead of withdrawing from NATO, he now says, Greece will remain a member until it can find a better way to meet its defense needs. And the referendum on European Community membership may never take place, since it would have to be called by President Constantine Caramanlis, who is fervently pro-European. In Brussels, European Community officials professed little concern. Said one: "I don't think for a moment that Greece is going to pull out."

In Western Europe. Papandreou's victory was immediately compared with that of his fellow socialist, Franc,ois Mitterrand, who was elected President of France five months ago after 23 years of conservative rule. Many French analysts sympathetic to Mitterrand saw the Greek socialists' victory as an affirmation that a fragile democracy had come of age. Pronounced the leftist daily Le Monde: "It is part of a democratic switch from one political party to another that has been all but absent in modern Greek politics."

Papandreou's victory is the culmination of a quixotic, often controversial career. As a law student in Athens, he was arrested in 1939 and tortured for forming a Trotskyite group and publishing a newspaper opposed to the dictatorship of John Metaxas. The next year Papandreou fled to the U.S., where he earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, became an American citizen, served in the Navy as a medical assistant and married his current wife, Chicago-born Margaret Chant. (They have since had four children.) Only in 1963, when his father, soon to become Prime Minister, persuaded Andreas to move back to his native land, did the younger Papandreou plunge into Greek politics. His father may have regretted the decision. Andreas' radical stands, including his opposition to the monarchy, weakened his father's centrist-left government, which fell after only 17 months, and the ensuing political instability provoked the military coup of "the colonels" in 1967.

The right-wing government immediately threw Andreas into Athens' dread Averof prison. Freed after eight months, he moved to Stockholm, then to Toronto. It was there that his anti-American and anti-NATO sentiments blossomed. Papandreou loudly claimed that the CIA had engineered the colonels' coup, and blamed Western Europeans for not opposing the military regime more strongly. To Papandreou, Greece's ancient enemy Turkey, also a NATO ally, is more of a threat than the Soviet Union. That notion was reinforced in 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus, an independent island nation with a predominantly Greek population.

For some Greeks, no doubt, Papandreou's appeal lay in his anti-Americanism. Boasted Actress Melina Mercouri, who won re-election on the PASOK ticket from the same Piraeus district in which she filmed Never on Sunday, and who has been appointed Minister of Culture and Sciences in the new government: "The U.S. treated us like a protectorate. Now the Americans will respect us."

Still, polls taken just before the election indicate that only about 5% of Greece's voters were influenced by Papandreou's foreign policy views. More than a quarter expressed concern about the country's economy, which for the third straight year is plagued by inflation running at more than 20%. Another quarter simply thought it was time for allagi (change), the watchword of Papandreou's campaign.

The urge for allagi was prompted not only by the desire to change faces at the top, but by the feeling that political institutions have not kept pace with Greece's transformation, in one generation, from a rural to an urban society. Since 1965, the country's per capita income has increased sevenfold; the number of automobiles has risen from 104,257 to more than 850,000; and infant mortality has dropped from 34 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1965 to only 19, compared with West Germany's 15.

But progress has also brought new problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than in greater Athens, where almost one-third of Greece's 9.6 million citizens now live. Often, the ancient city is cloaked in a suffocating smog so thick that residents cannot see the Acropolis. Says Yannis Manos, who left his native village on a small Dodecanese island and today drives a battered taxi in Athens: "If I had known then what this would cost, I never would have left Patmos."

With the rush to industrialization has come a decline in the institutions that have held Greeks together for centuries: family, tradition and the Orthodox Church. The urbanized, secularized Greek goes his own way, ignoring admonitions against birth control, divorce and abortion.

For many modern Greeks, Papandreou's cry for change seemed right for the times. He promised to establish civil marriages, liberalize abortion, allow divorce by common consent, and separate church from state, a radical prospect in a religiously orthodox society. He attracted the votes of younger women with his pledge to end male domination of Greek society by allowing women equal control over family affairs and enhancing benefits for working mothers. He announced plans to "socialize" such large industries as banking, drugs and fertilizers, though he did not explain precisely how he would do it. Papandreou also wants to improve national health service, make universities more accessible, index wages and pensions to keep up with inflation, and give special care to the aged. All are costly proposals that would likely drive up the inflation rate of 24%, already the highest in the European Community.

Now that he is in office, Papandreou is beginning to realize that his ambitions may exceed Greece's means. "We are not miracle workers," he cautioned at the end of his campaign. Still, Greeks expressed high expectations when they said neh (yes) to Papandreou. To avoid disappointing his voters, the new Prime Minister will have to practice a pragmatism that does not embroil Greece in international quarrels that it clearly cannot afford.

--By Henry Muller.

Reported by Walter Galling and Wilton Wynn/Athens

With reporting by Walter Galling, Wilton Wynn

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