The interwar period in Greece was a turbulent political period characterised by the alternation of monarchy and republic, successive military coups in favour of different political options, and the country's continuing economic weakness. Strictly, the country did not emerge from World War I until its defeat by the new Turkish republic in the 1919-1922 war and did not enter World War II until the Italian attack in October 1940.

Despite having parliamentary governments for most of the interwar period and only short periods of dictatorship (until Metaxas from 1936 onwards), the state of siege, which allowed governments to infringe civil rights, was common. The main feature of Greek politics at the time was not, however, the continuity of the parliamentary system, but the perpetuation of the ‘National Schism’ between supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos and those of successive monarchs, which had begun in 1915. The abolition of the monarchy and Venizelos' subsequent temporary withdrawal from politics in 1924 favoured the military's involvement in politics. The model of the state, contested between republicans and monarchists, was one of the main causes of the continuing political crisis. The military, also divided between republicans and monarchists, staged successive coups d'état (1925, 1926, 1933 and 1935) in favour of the republic until, in 1936, after the restoration of the monarchy, republican officers were expelled from the armed forces.

In economic terms, the interwar period was one of the most dynamic periods in the country's history, marked by industrial growth, economic development and the redistribution of wealth. Growth, however, was insufficient for the Greek peasantry and proletariat to achieve a good standard of living. Like other Balkan countries at the time, rapid population growth, low agricultural productivity, insufficient industrial growth to absorb the overpopulation of the countryside and a weak internal market kept them poor.

Domestic policy

General features

Greek domestic politics in the interwar period, which for Greece properly began with the end of the war with Turkey in 1922-1923, was mainly characterised by the confrontation between two blocs, which emerged after 1909 and became entrenched during the First World War: they played a leading role in the so-called ‘national schism’: the Venizelist and the anti-Venizelist blocs, names derived from one of the leading politicians in Greek history in the first third of the 20th century, Eleftherios Venizelos. The supporters of the former were mainly republicans, like other minor left-wing groups such as the agrarians and the communists, while the latter were monarchists. The two groups were organised around a main party, which was accompanied by others, sometimes with a short-lived existence. That of the Venizelos group was the Liberal Party, founded and led by Venizelos himself and then, towards the end of the period, by Themistoklis Sophoulis.Some leaders left the party to form their own political formations: Alexandros Papanastasiou presided over the Republican Union or Agrarian-Labor Party, the left of the Venizelist group; Andreas Michalakópoulos occupied the other end of the spectrum at the head of his small group, the Liberal Conservatives or Republican Conservatives; and Georgios Kaphantaris headed the center-right Progressives. General Georgios Kondylis, at the head of the National Republicans or Radical Republicans, was the main leader of the Venizelist groups (although he later changed sides), mainly because of his prominent role in the extra-parliamentary politics of the time. (Mavrogordatos, 1983, p. 26) That of the anti-Venizelist was the People's Party (sometimes called Populist Party), founded by Dimitrios Gounaris and later chaired by Panagis Tsaldaris, absorbed the structures of the old parties that had been swept away by Venizelos' accession to national politics in 1909. The Liberal Party was the political organisation par excellence of the bourgeoisie, made up of merchants, shipowners, small bankers and industrialists.

The war with Turkey also had a considerable influence on Greek politics at the time: it ended the fundamental importance of irredentism as the focus of foreign policy, radically changed the composition of the electoral roll due to the arrival of more than a million people, made the refugee problem the country's main internal problem, and facilitated the temporary end of the monarchy.

Political parties were generally clientelist and caudillista structures, which membership groups failed to eliminate. The two main parties were so, despite attempts, particularly in the case of the Liberal Party, to transform themselves into a modern mass party based on membership groups rather than patronage groups of local notables, which were thwarted by them. The caudillista and clientelist character of the political organisations was even more evident in the case of the minor parties, which were essentially made up of their founder, the notables who split with him from the parent party out of dissatisfaction, and their clientelist networks, mainly corresponding to their regions of origin. Clientelism was also more accentuated in the right-wing parties than in the left-wing ones —none in the case of the Communist party— in rural areas than in urban areas and in the territories of the old kingdom than in those annexed after 1912.

Defeat against Turkey and its consequences (1923-1925)

The interwar period in Greece began after a series of major changes, some of which extended into the 1920s: the decade of almost uninterrupted wars from 1912 to 1922, the large population exchange with Turkey that took place between 1919 and 1924, and the implementation of a major land reform between 1917 and 1927.

When Greece was defeated in the war against the new Turkish republic, a coup in 1922 overthrew the monarchical government that had led the last years of the campaign and established one of the briefest periods of non-parliamentary government in modern Greek history. It was led by Colonels Plastiras and Gonatas, who were supported by 20,000 troops who landed at Lavrio. The coup plotters presented the king with an ultimatum of 26 September, which he accepted before leaving the throne to his son George and going into exile. The coup, which was widely supported, gave way once again to a civilian government. Republican officers temporarily gained control of the army after the defeat in Asia Minor and executed six royalist ministers and military officers,On 28 November, six of the eight high-ranking political and military officials arrested after the military uprising, five ministers and the former commanding general Georgios Hatzianestis were shot. (Campbell, Sherrard, 1969, p. 127) who were considered the main perpetrators of the defeat in November 1922. Those executed served primarily as scapegoats for the military failure, thereby exonerating the army as a whole for the defeat and assuaging the desire for revenge among soldiers and refugees, but also perpetuated the division that had emerged during the world war between supporters of the king and Venizelos. The new military government headed by Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras was initially intended to present itself as non-partisan, but the repression of anti-Venizelos supporters and the execution of ‘the six’ caused it to take a Venizelosist turn. The military coup had two main consequences: it divided the Venizelists into supporters and opponents of the republican system, and it emancipated the military from the civilian political leadership.

One of the first tasks of the military government was to negotiate peace with Turkey, which was finally signed at Lausanne on 24 July 1923, and to settle the refugees from Turkish territory. The Greek military defeat by Turkey led to a population exchange agreement between the two countries (January 30, 1923): some 1.4 million refugees1.3 million according to Papacosma. (Papacosma, 1980. p. 3) from Turkish territory were transferred to Greece, and some 350,000 Turks and Bulgarians left. The only exceptions were the Turkish population of Western Thrace and the Greek population of Constantinople.By the time the agreement was reached, about one million Greeks had fled or been expelled from Turkey and only about one hundred and fifty thousand more had to move to Greece. (Campbell, Sherrard, 1969, p. 129) Also, three hundred and eighty-eight thousand Turks were deported to Turkey. (Campbell, Sherrard, 1969, p. 129) Some one hundred thousand Greeks remained in Constantinople. (Campbell, Sherrard, 1969, p. 129) Greece and Bulgaria had already agreed in 1919 to a similar, if theoretically voluntary, population exchange in 1919, which resulted in fifty-three thousand people going to Bulgaria and thirty thousand to Greece. (Papacosma, p. 1980, p. 2) Some eighty thousand Slavs, officially considered ‘Slavic-speaking Greeks’ and unofficially Bulgarians, remained on Greek territory. (Papacosma, 1980, p. 3) This made Greece one of the nation states with the lowest percentage of minorities —6 %— and concentrated almost the entire Greek-speaking population in the country. For Greece, then home to some five million people, the settlement and integration of refugees was a major problem that successive governments had to deal with. The exchange did, however, eliminate one of the pillars of Greece's previous foreign policy since independence in the 19th century, namely irredentism, which has since been reduced to the Greek minority in Albania, Cyprus and the Dodecanese, which is of secondary importance. The settlement of some 700,000 refugees in Macedonia, a region in dispute with Serbia (later Yugoslavia) and Bulgaria, ensured the Hellenisation of the territory: if the population of Greek culture had been approximately 43% of the total in 1913 compared to 39% of Muslims, by 1926 it was already 89%. The same was true of the important cosmopolitan city of Thessaloniki, which in 1912 had a majority Sephardic Jewish population.

The main threat to the military government of Plastiras, the ‘leader’ of the ‘revolution’, and Gonatas, the prime minister, were the officers who thought the overthrow of Constantine and the shooting of the political and military leaders of November 1922 were insufficient and who demanded the end of the monarchy, who banded together in a military league in July 1923. The league undermined discipline in the army and increased the political influence of some officers: Generals Theodoros Pangalos, Georgios Kondylis and Alexandros Othonaios and Admiral Alexandros Chatzykiriakos. This grouping of the republican military brought together their opponents.

Monarchist and liberal military officers opposed to the Republicans tried in vain to overthrow the Republican government of General Stylianos Gonatas in a failed coup d'état on 23 October 1923. The great purge of anti-Venizelist officers that followed the failed attempt —more than a thousand were expelled from the army—Half a thousand, according to Campbell and Sherrard (Campbell, Sherrard, 1969, p. 13). and the fear that the anti-Venizelists would take revenge for the executions of November 1922 made the officers determined defenders of the republic. The failure also ended the hopes of Ioannis Metaxas' party, which until then had preoccupied his Venizellist opponents, for an electoral victory in the planned elections, and Metaxas himself fled the country. It also temporarily sealed the fate of the monarchy, which was abolished shortly afterwards.