MODERN GREECE: A History since 1821 - Amazon Web Services

RETURN TO DEMOCRACY (1974–2009) 169
honest broker in the region, Papandreou pursued his own idiosyncratic
multilateralism. He began his Balkan initiatives by reviving an old
Romanian proposal for a regional nuclear- weapons-free-zone and
gradually became an exponent of all forms of regional cooperation. 14
With Mikhail Gorbachev’s devolution underway, the meeting of six
Balkan foreign ministers in Belgrade in February 1988, dealing with
confidence- and security-building measures and minority questions,
heralded a new period of inter-Balkan relations. The meeting of Balkan
foreign ministers held in Tirana during January 18–20, 1989, examined
guidelines to govern relations between Balkan neighbors, while the
meeting of experts in Bucharest, on May 23–24, 1989, dealt with confidence-
and security-building measures. 15
PASOK’s fall from grace was not unexpected. The 1985 elections had
already contained early signs of dissatisfaction of the electorate. The
party’s poor performance in conjunction with allegations of corruption
and favoritism caused the loss of a number of voters in Athens. When
Andreas realized that his appeal was slipping he tried to boost his position
by bringing about institutional changes to strengthen his grip on
power. So in 1986 he changed the constitution to restrict considerably
the president’s powers, turning him into a ceremonial figure who could
no longer dissolve parliament, dismiss the government, proclaim
elections, suspend certain articles of the constitution, or declare a state
of siege. Papandreou thus made sure that any future president of whatever
hue would never be in a position to endanger a Socialist government,
even though Karamanlis had never opposed any of Papandreou’s
moves and had never used the powers that he held under the 1975
constitution to create problems for the government. In fact the Greek
version of “cohabitation” proved smooth enough for Papandreou to
have acknowledged as much publicly, more than once.
Any extra powers that the new constitution gave Andreas proved of
little use to him, however. By the late 1980s Greece had fallen behind
both Portugal and Ireland in the movement toward convergence with
the EEC average GDP while the IMF, the OECD, and the Commission
were producing alarming reports on Greece. The economy, they all
noted, seemed stuck in a vicious circle of low investment, sluggish
growth, dependence on state subsidies, deficit financing by the government,
high inflation, and tight credit.
The turning point in PASOK’s fortunes was the illness of Papandreou
and his absence from the administration of power during the summer