The Pangalos dictatorship

On 3 January 1926 General Theodoros Pangalos, Prime Minister of Greece for the previous six months, announced that he was assuming full legislative and constitutional power and would rule as dictator. He postponed indefinitely the Senate elections scheduled for 10 January. He justified this by claiming that Venizelist and republican politicians were making government impossible through their “reactionary and subversive” activities, and promised to restore normal parliamentary life as soon as possible. In reality he had been ruling without parliament for several months. All 3 January meant was that he had stopped pretending. His dictatorship lasted less than eight months, but it was the first in the history of the Greek republic and a foretaste of the one with which Greece entered the Second World War.

A republic without stability

Defeat in the war with Turkey shook Greece to its foundations. In September 1922 the army rebelled under Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras and forced King Constantine I to abdicate, and six politicians and generals blamed for the catastrophe were shot. Pangalos, an ardent Venizelist and opponent of the monarchy, was among the most implacable advocates of their trial. He then rebuilt the shattered army on the Evros and opposed the Treaty of Lausanne, which he considered a needless capitulation. In August 1923 the country suffered a further humiliation in the Italian bombardment and occupation of Corfu, which ended with a fine paid to Italy. On top of all this, more than a million refugees from Asia Minor had to be settled in a ruined state.

After a failed putsch by royalist officers in October 1923 and elections won by the Venizelists, King George II left the country in December. On 25 March 1924 a constituent assembly proclaimed a republic, which a plebiscite confirmed in April. The Second Hellenic Republic, however, knew no peace. Governments changed every few months, the assembly had failed for more than a year to adopt a constitution, the budget did not balance, the drachma was losing value, strikes broke out in the cities, and the army, accustomed since 1909 to meddling in politics, was split into rival cliques of officers.

The coup of June 1925

On the night of 24–25 June 1925 Pangalos, warned that the government intended to arrest him, called on the officers in the plot to act. With the support of the fleet under Admiral Alexandros Hatzikyriakos, his men took control of Athens, Thessaloniki and Macedonia. Nobody resisted, and the government of Andreas Michalakopoulos resigned. The President, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis, entrusted Pangalos with forming a government, and on 1 July the assembly gave him a vote of confidence with almost no opposition. Constitutional appearances had been preserved. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote at the time that Pangalos had long been “a thorn in the side of civilian governments”.

The new Prime Minister quickly showed what he understood by government. Under a law for the defence of the regime he prosecuted journalists and closed newspapers, including the Athens daily Kathimerini and the Communist Rizospastis. In September he set up a special security service to combat the Communists, who were exiled to the islands of the Aegean. On the night of 29–30 September he induced the President to sign a constitution he had amended himself and dissolved the assembly by decree. From then on he ruled by decree. He became notorious for his decrees on public morals, above all for having the police measure women’s skirts, which were not allowed to end more than 30 centimetres above the ground. He introduced the death penalty for officials caught embezzling, and several of them were hanged.

The War of the Stray Dog

The most notorious act of his rule was the quarrel with Bulgaria. On 18 October 1925, at the Demir Kapia pass in the Belasitsa mountains on the Greek–Bulgarian border, a shoot-out left a Greek sentry dead and, according to the Greek version, an officer as well. A popular story has it that it began when a Greek soldier crossed the border chasing his dog and was shot by a Bulgarian guard, which is why the whole conflict later came to be called the “War of the Stray Dog”. Bulgaria expressed its regret and proposed a joint inquiry. Pangalos was convinced that the Bulgarians were preparing an invasion. On 21 October he sent Sofia a 48-hour ultimatum demanding an apology, punishment of those responsible and compensation, and on 22 October Greek troops entered Bulgaria near Petrich and occupied a strip of land several kilometres deep.

The Bulgarian army, limited by the Treaty of Neuilly, did not fight back, although border guards and volunteers put up resistance near Petrich, and the government in Sofia appealed to the League of Nations. This time the League acted efficiently: the Council demanded a ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops, and the great powers, agreed that Greece was the aggressor, threatened sanctions. On 28 October Athens announced that its troops were withdrawing. A League commission chaired by the British diplomat Horace Rumbold ordered Greece to pay £45,000 in compensation, and the Council approved its report on 14 December 1925. The contrast with Corfu was striking. Two years earlier the League had been unable to do anything against a great power that had attacked Greece. Now it disciplined little Greece without difficulty for attacking even smaller Bulgaria. In Greece itself, however, his tough stance towards the “age-old enemy” won Pangalos popularity. He had his former superior Plastiras, who had returned to conspire, deported to Italy.

Dictator and President

In December 1925 Pangalos seemed to be moving towards normality: he suspended the law for the defence of the regime and announced elections. Press criticism after the Rumbold report and amid a worsening economic situation was enough, however, for him to forbid newspapers on 30 December to print statements by Venizelist and republican leaders and to proclaim a dictatorship on 3 January. In protest Hatzikyriakos, his most important ally from the time of the coup, left the government. In January the dictator announced a forced loan: large banknotes were cut in half, one half remaining valid for half its face value while the other was exchanged for government bonds. In February, on the pretext of rumours of a conspiracy, he had General Georgios Kondylis and two former prime ministers, Alexandros Papanastasiou and Georgios Kafantaris, arrested and exiled to volcanic Santorini.

In March he announced a return to normal political life, beginning with a presidential election in which he himself would stand. The electoral law of 18 March was written so as to eliminate most of his potential rivals. President Kountouriotis resigned in protest. The parties jointly put forward a little-known moderate politician, Konstantinos Demertzis, but Pangalos banned even the printing of his election address. When he decided that half the country – the half where his support was strongest – would vote on 4 April and the rest a week later, Demertzis withdrew on 3 April. Chronologies often state that Pangalos “was elected President on 4 April”. Voting, however, began on 4 April and ended on 11 April. As early as 6 April, without waiting for the result, Pangalos assumed the powers of the presidency and extended them by decree. According to the official results he received about 93 per cent of the vote, 782,589 against 56,126 for Demertzis, whose name remained on the ballot papers. On 18 April he was sworn in as President of the Republic while also keeping the office of Prime Minister.

Downfall

Pangalos admired Mussolini and sought closer ties with Italy. Italian visitors were warmly received in Athens and rifles were ordered from Italy, while rumours circulated in Europe of a Greek–Italian understanding directed against Turkey, which Pangalos never ceased to regard as an enemy. The great powers watched this with concern, but nothing came of it. France persuaded itself that the dictator was a Francophile, and the British, prepared to tolerate him as a guarantor of order, recognised him as President in July 1926.

At home, however, he gained no new supporters. Politicians refused to cooperate, the economy was crumbling, and the army that had raised him to power began to turn against him. In July he exiled leading politicians to the island of Naxos and entrusted the government to the economist Athanasios Eftaxias. In August two coup attempts were put down. The last straw was the agreement with Yugoslavia of 17 August, which gave it extensive rights in the port of Thessaloniki and on the railway to the border. The opposition and the army regarded it as a betrayal of national interests. On 22 August 1926 General Kondylis – the same man Pangalos had exiled to Santorini – carried out an almost bloodless coup. Pangalos was on holiday on the island of Spetses. He tried to escape on a torpedo boat, but a pursuing destroyer forced the vessel to surrender. The dictator was imprisoned and was not released until 1928. Kountouriotis returned to the presidency.

Significance

The Pangalos dictatorship was short and inept, and many Greeks remembered it mainly as “the era of long skirts”. Yet it had serious consequences. It showed that power in Greece could be seized by a single night-time move of the garrisons, and it was not the last such episode: further coup attempts followed in 1933 and 1935, and in November 1935, after another coup by Kondylis and a rigged plebiscite, the monarchy returned. On 4 August 1936 General Ioannis Metaxas, with the King’s consent, suspended the constitution and established a dictatorship known as the 4th of August Regime. It was this regime that governed Greece when, on 28 October 1940, Mussolini, whom Pangalos had so admired, sent Athens an ultimatum.

Pangalos’s rule was also one of many attempts in Europe at the time to copy the Fascist model in a country without a mass Fascist movement. Like the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain or, in that same year of 1926, the coups in Poland, Portugal and Lithuania, it bore witness to the crisis of parliamentary democracy, which in Central and Southern Europe had begun to retreat as early as the mid-1920s, before the Great Depression and Hitler arrived. Pangalos himself played no further part in government, but during the German occupation his men, and he himself from behind the scenes, helped to create the collaborationist Security Battalions.