Greek Rally
그리스 연합
A Greek right-wing conservative party founded on 6 August 1951 by Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos. In the November 1952 elections it won an overwhelming majority of the 300 seats, the first absolute majority of the post-war era, and governed from 1952 to 1955 with Papagos as prime minister. After Papagos died in October 1955 and Konstantinos Karamanlis founded the National Radical Union in January 1956, most of its deputies moved over and the party became inactive.
In depth
According to the Greek source, Papagos announced on 31 July 1951 that he would enter politics ahead of the September elections, a decision strongly opposed by King Paul. On 6 August he founded the Greek Rally, modelled on Charles de Gaulle’s Rally of the French People. The party absorbed most of the supporters and cadres of the People’s Party, the main pre-war party of the right; Spyros Markezinis’s New Party and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos’s and Stefanos Stefanopoulos’s Populist Uniting Party dissolved themselves and joined it, as did some centrist deputies.
In the September 1951 elections the Greek Rally won a plurality of 114 seats, but Papagos refused to form a coalition, so it remained in opposition while a centrist coalition government was formed under Nikolaos Plastiras. Ahead of the 1952 elections many deputies of the centre, mainly from the Liberal Party, joined it, and Georgios Papandreou also ran with it as an independent. The Greek source says it won 247 seats, becoming the first party of the post-war era to win an absolute majority; the English source gives 240 seats and adds that a change in the electoral system helped considerably.
While in government, Papandreou left on 13 April 1953 over the government’s economic policy, and in 1954 Markezinis resigned after a dispute with Papagos, went independent with 22 deputies and founded the Progressive Party. As Papagos’s health declined from late 1954, Kanellopoulos and Stefanopoulos were appointed vice-presidents; Papagos died on 4 October 1955.
The King rejected the procedure by which the parliamentary group would elect a leader and gave the mandate to Konstantinos Karamanlis. On 4 January 1956 Karamanlis founded the National Radical Union (ERE), which 174 Greek Rally deputies and most of its cadres and supporters joined; the same day Stefanopoulos founded the Popular Social Party with 13 deputies, and the Greek Rally became inactive.