The fall of dictatorship in Portugal, Spain, and Greece: 50 years on

On 28 May, SEESOX, in cooperation with  the European Studies Centre (ESC) hosted a panel on the fall of dictatorship, and the transitions to democracy, including their legacies on current political developments in Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

The panel consisted of Joao Carlos Espada, Professor at the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, Ainhoa Campos Posada, historian at the Universidad Complutense Madrid, and Harris Mylonas, Associate Professor at George Washington University’ Elliott School of International Affairs, focusing on Portugal, Spain, and Greece, respectively. The seminar was chaired by ESC and SEESOX director, Othon Anastasakis.

According to Joao Carlos Espada Portugal, Spain, and Greece are the first cases of what Samuel Huntington called “the third wave of world democratisation” which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism in Central and Easter Europe.

He argued that the military coup that heralded the establishment of democracy in Portugal on 25 April 1974 was followed by a clash between two radically different conceptions of democracy: on the one hand, popular/populist democracy, which was supported by the Communists in Portugal, and on the other, parliamentary democracy. Although (or perhaps because) the Communists were electorally beaten in the first democratic Portuguese elections in April 1975, they attempted a coup in November 1975 and they were defeated by a coalition of left and center-right parties led by Mário Soares, the leader of the Socialist party and lifelong opponent of the far right dictatorship of Salazar.Carlos Espada credited the intellectual influences of Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and particularly Ralf Dahrendorf as inspirations for the intellectual dispositions that led to the transitions in Europe. He further discussed two concepts of revolution – namely, dogmatic revolution of an authoritarian kind and a critical and piecemeal revolution towards a free and pluralist competition. He concluded that parliamentary democracy won in Portugal because pseudo-democracy was fought and won over.

Ainhoa Campos Posada highlighted the political instrumentalisation of the memory and the myth of transition to democracy in Spain. According to this myth the Spanish democratic transition had been one of national unity, an inevitable and natural process towards democratic consolidation. The general consensus had been that the transition started with the death of Franco in 1975 and ended with the elections of 1982 which brought to power the Socialist leader Felipe Gonzalez. The official discourse on the transition saw the process driven by socio economic needs and led by the king and a small group of politicians, a success story that constituted a model for South American democratic transitions. The media reinforced this discourse and crystalised the transition myth in the public consciousness.

A turning point, according to Campos Posada, came during the financial crisis and the popular protests in of 2011 which led to revisiting the memory of transition and linked the latter to the problems that Spain faced during the years of crisis. Moreover, the popularity of the King was tarnished and the public started seeing him, not as the guarantor of transition but as someone who had been appointed by Francisco Franco. Related to that, another myth that was challenged was the legacy of Adolfo Suarez, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Spain, for his reluctance to subject the monarchy to a referendum during the transition.

Harris Mylonas discussed the transition to democracy, or more accurately metapolitefsi as it is commonly known in Greece, and the meaning of democracy for the different Greek political parties. While the vast majority of Greeks see the fall of dictatorship as a transition to democracy, yet they refer to different points in time as transition markers. For some it is July 1974 when Karamanlis came to Greece from his exile in Paris; for others it is 1975 with the adoption of the new democratic constitution; for the supporters of Andreas Papandreou, many of whom saw the Karamanlis government as a continuation of the old regime, the transition only happened in 1981, when PASOK came to power. For many on the left of the political spectrum, the transition from the military dictatorship to the governments of Kostantinos Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou is seen merely as a move towards procedural, rather than substantive, democracy. A minority view has been that the transition never fully materialized.

Mylonas, like Campos Posada, argued that the transition to democracy was not inevitable and the political actors at the time did not think of it as inevitable, either; Andreas Papandreou, for example, was worried that there would be a coup after 1981 – and as late as 1983 or 1984 – which shows the uncertainty of the process. Similar to the Spanish case, Mylonas argued, the metapolitefsi in Greece held an important legitimating legacy for the so-called Polytechnic generation – referring to the 1973 student protests against the military regime that together with the tragedy in Cyprus led to the downfall of dictatorship – which for a long time legitimated their position in politics on the basis of their resistance to the dictatorship. As this memory has faded away and this generation gradually disappeared, this left space for a more critical understanding of the period of transition, a stance which became more prevalent during the years of the financial crisis that reignited a discussion concerning democratic backsliding in Greece across the political spectrum.

By Alban Dafa ( SEESOX Researcher)