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The Hellenic Parliament (Βουλή των Ελλήνων, ) is the parliament of Greece, located in the Athens' Old Royal Palace, overlooking Syntagma Square. The parliament is Greece's supreme democratic institution. It is a unicameral legislature made up of 200–300 members of parliament (MPs) elected for a four-year term in multi-member constituencies. MPs are elected to represent the nation and not their constituents. Up to 15 MPs can be elected through a national list, while 50 seats are given to the first party as a majority bonus. All Parliaments since 1957 have had 300 members.

The Parliament was established at the aftermath of the 1843 revolution and was the first to be elected with universal (male) suffrage, inspired by the ideals of the Revolutions of 1830. In the periods 1844–1863 and 1924–1935 it was bicameral, with an upper house called the Gerousía (Γερουσία), and a lower house which retained the name Voulí. Jointly, they are referred to as Kinovoulion (Κοινοβούλιον, Parliament). Before the Old Royal Palace was converted to house the Parliament in 1934, it was housed at the purpose-built Old Parliament House since 1875.

The Hellenic Parliament selects the Prime Minister of Greece, usually the political leader whose party won the most seats, and has the power to overturn the government and call a fresh election through a vote of no confidence. The Prime Minister and their Government must command the support of at least 151 MPs, a parliamentary principle introduced in 1875 and known as Dedilomeni (Δεδηλωμένη, literally declared [confidence]). Its leader is the President of the Hellenic Parliament.

Name
The term Hellenic Parliament (Ελληνικό Κοινοβούλιο, ) is the unofficial name of the legislature in Greek, but in English it is used as the official name. The Greek name of the institution translates as Will of the Hellenes or Boule of the Hellenes (Βουλή των Ελλήνων, old spelling: Βουλὴ τῶν Ἑλλήνων, ). In ancient Greece, a Boulē (literally will, determination) was a council appointed to run the day-to-day activities of a city, the most famous of which was boulē of Athens. This is not to be confused with the Athenian Ecclēsía, which was the supreme legislative body made up of all free citizens.

When the parliament was bicameral, the term Gerousía was used to refer to the upper house (Γερουσία ). In the Spartan Constitution the boulē was called Gerousia, a council of 30 elders with the authority to debate or block motions brought to it Spartan citizens' assembly, the Apella; a role similar to an upper house.

Revolutionary assemblies
The earliest example of a legislative body for Greece is in 1797, when Rigas Feraios publishes his New Political Administration, the earliest Greek constitution, and specifically names the legislative body as Vouli. It was to be made up of 750 members of parliament divided into an 250-member upper house called the Vouli of the Elders and a 600-member lower house called the Vouli of the 500.

The first Greek legislative body to have recognised authority was the Senate of the Septinsular Republic, instituted in 1800. This was short lived and in 1815 the United States of the Ionian Islands were formed as a protectorate of the United Kingdom, with the Legislative Assembly assuming the role of legislature and the Senate assuming the role of a collective executive.

Constitutional monarchy
The 1832 amendment to the London Protocol saw the Great Powers of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom impose a monarchy on Greece. Otto, the first King of Greece, arrived at the age of 17 and a regency made up of Bavarian officials ruled in his name, headed by Josef Ludwig von Armansperg. When Otto took the throne he ruled autocratically, even assuming the office of Prime Minister in 1837; a position he held, with a 47-day break, until a Revolution in 1843 forced him to accept a Constitution.



Constitutionalism was ushered in with the introduction of the Constitution of 1844, but democratic institutions remained weak and the King still had considerable power within the political process. The Constitution formally introduced the terms Gerousia (Senate) for the lower house and Vouli for the upper house, introducing a bicamera legislature, and vested legislative power not only in Parliament, but also in the King. A significant difference between the Parliament in 1844 and the current system is that members of the Vouli were elected for three-year terms, as opposed to four-year terms today, and Senators served for life. The number of MPs in the lower house was set by the electoral law according to the population of the parliamentary constituencies, with a minimum of 80 MPs. The minimum number of Senators was set at 27, but the King had the authority to increase the number up to 50% of the number of MPs in the lower house. The Constitution of 1844 granted universal suffrage for men. This Constitution was based on the French and Belgian ones of 1831.

Party politics in this era were dominated by the three early Greek parties: the English Party, the French (or Constitutional) Party, and the Russian Party. These were reflective of Great Power meddling in the country's internal politics, and party leaders were usually associated with the corresponding ambassador of each empire. The English party, the smallest, was Anglophile, socially liberal but closest the monarchy; the French party was Francophile and constitutionalist; while the Russian party was conservative, Russophile, and pro-Orthodoxy.

Following the revolution, the Parliament was housed in an octagonal banquet hall built for Otto, which burnt down in 1854. Construction on a new Parliament building started in 1858, on a design by the French architect François Louis Florimond Boulanger, but stopped a year later in 1859. Meanwhile, the Hellenic Parliament temporarily met at the University of Athens.

Despite the Constitution, Otto continued to rule despotically and remained controversial, until another Revolution in 1862 forced him into exile in his native Bavaria.

Crowned republic (18631924)
Otto's exile and the subsequent Greek Constitution of 1864 marked Greece's move away from constitutional monarchy and towards a system of government known as a crowned republic or a crowned democracy (Βασιλευομένη Δημοκρατία, Vasilevoméni Dimokratía). This moved Greece more towards the parliamentary system of governance implemented in the United Kingdom, where the head of state is purely ceremonial, as opposed to the more despotic constitutions of France (1830) and Belgium (1831), in which varied degrees of power are vested in the Monarch. Suffrage was universal (for men) and secret.

Many of the constitutional conventions of Greece were formulated in this period, with the Dedilomeni (Δεδηλωμένη, literally declared [confidence]) being the most significant. The introduction of the notion that a government must enjoy the support of an absolute majority of Members of Parliament was brought about by Charilaos Trikoupis, the liberal Modernist Party politician who in an article titled Who is to blame? (τίς πταῖει;) accused George I of absolutism by appointing a series of minority governments. Challenging the King landed Trikoupis in jail for a short time. It was proposed that the Dedilomeni should be included in the Constitution of 1864, but this was ultimately rejected. George I acknowledged the principle in his Throne Speech to the Parliament on 11 August 1875, and it has been a fundamental constitutional convention ever since. It was formally introduced into the Constitution in 1927 and has been maintained in all successive constitutions, including the current one.

I demand as a prerequisite qualification of those called to the government of the land on my behalf that they have the declared towards them confidence of the representatives of the nation, I hope that the Parliament may constitute possible the existence of such a qualification, where without it the harmonious function of the government is rendered impossible.



The Parliament building designed by Boulanger was modified by Panagis Kalkos, who removed the now-abolished Senate chamber, and opened on 11 August 1875 under the Premiership of Trikoupis. A polarised two-party system developed in the following years, between Trikoupis' liberal Modernist Party and Theodoros Diligiannis' irredentist Nationalist Party, but party politics remained personality-driven. On 13 June 1905 Theodoros Diligiannis, who was serving a fourth tenure as Prime Minister, was assassinated at the Parliament steps. By 1909 dissatisfaction within the military led to the Goudi coup, Greece's first military coup d'état.

This period also saw the representation of areas which are now not part of Greece. Following the 1915 election, 19 MPs from Northern Epirus were added, which was at the time occupied by Greece; 11 from Argyrokastro (Gjirokaster) and 8 from Korytsa (Korçë). The 1920 election saw MPs from East Thrace, which was annexed to Greece in the Treaty of Sèvres, with the exception of Istanbul; the constituencies there were won in a Liberal landslide which accounted for almost 50% of the total seats won by the Liberals despite the fact that they lost the election. East Thrace was given back to Turkey in the Treaty of Lausanne three years later.

Additionally, in 1912, 69 Cretans were elected in the Cretan State to be represented in the Hellenic Parliament, 46 Conservatives and 23 Liberals. Despite being a Cretan himself however, and having served as Prime Minister of the Cretan State in 1910, Eleftherios Venizelos refused to accept them as Crete was not then officially a part of Greece and he feared a diplomatic incident with the Ottoman Empire, which caused a snap election. Cretan MPs would join the Parliament when enosis (union) was achieved a year later, in 1913.

First parliamentary republic (19241935)


In the immediate aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 19191922, which saw Greece defeated and forced to give back lands it had acquired in the Treaty of Sèvres, there was another another Revolution on 11 September. The leaders of the revolution, headed by Nikolaos Plastiras, arrested numerous political leaders and carried out the Trial of the Six. Six political leaders were accused of deliberate high treason and executed, including Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris. The convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court of Greece in 2010 as new evidence surfaced. The resulting years saw a rise in republicanism, especially within the Liberal Party, which dominated Parliament after the 1923 election. This culminated in the abolition of the monarchy on 25 March 1924, on the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, and the declaration of the Second Hellenic Republic.

The referendum on establishing a republic which was held the same year asked voters if they approve the re-organisation of Greece into "a republic of the parliamentary form". 69.9% of voters approved of the change in the form of government, and the Greek Constitution of 1927 brought about an era of renewed parliamentarism. Bicameralism was re-introduced and the Gerousia was brought back as a 120-member upper house. It was composed of 90 elected directly by the electorate for a three-year-term and renewed every three years, 18 elected by 8 Labour unions or professional associations (including industrialists, merchants, workers, and academics), 12 were elected by a Joint Session of Parliament, and 2 were given to ethnic minorities: 1 for the Turks of Western Thrace and 1 for the Jews of Thessaloniki.

The Parliament during the Second Republic was varied and multi-party. The main political parties were the Liberal Party and the mildly monarchist People's Party, led by Eleftherios Venizelos and Panagis Tsaldaris respectively. Six elections took place under the Second Republic, with the Liberal party winning a landslide victory in the 1926 election, winning 47% of the vote. It triumphed again in the Gerousia election of 1929, winning 54% of the vote. Political instability and the Great Depression began to hit the Liberal party, however, and the People's Party began to gain ground, winning the popular vote in the 1932 election but falling 6 seats behind the Liberals. It scored a decisive victory in 1933 and Tsaldaris assumed the Premiership. Liberal Party members in the army, fearing the abolition of the Republic was imminent, launched a coup d'état attempt. The coup failed and Venizelos left Greece. The Liberals boycotted the 1935 election and the People's Party won 65% of the votes and a supermajority in parliament: 95% of seats. Using this supermajority, Tsaldaris abolished the Republic.

The Liberal government under Venizelos had introduced a law in 1929, known as (ιδιώνυμο), which was aimed at suppressing the Communist Party of Greece as well as the trade unions. Strong opposition was voiced from political allies of the Liberal party, mostly Papanastasiou's Agricultural and Labour Party, since Venizelos refused to extend the provisions of the law to fascists, instead targeting communists and socialists.

Crowned republic (19351973)
The restoration of the monarchy forced a new Parliament yet again following the 1936 election, and the Liberal Party emerged as the largest in Parliament. King George II, ignoring both the election and the Constitutional principle of the, ignored the result and gave the Premiership to Ioannis Metaxas, a political ally of the Palace and the King. Metaxas swiftly abolished the Parliament, made Greece an authoritarian single-party state modelled on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and declared himself (Ηγέτης) with the approval of the King.

The Hellenic Parliament would not convene again until the 1946 election. The Italian invasion of Greece in 1941, and the subsequent invasion by Germany and Bulgaria, the Axis occupation until 1945 and then the outbreak of the Greek Civil War all hampered the return of parliamentary rule.

Voting became truly universal in 1952, when women were enfranchised. The government of Dimitrios Gounaris had proposed giving the vote to women in 1922, but attempts failed due to strong parliamentary opposition. Emmanuel Rhoides is quoted as having said that "two professions are fit for women: housewife and prostitute". Literate women of over 30 could finally vote in 1930, but only in local elections. Eleni Skoura, from Thessaloniki, became the first woman elected to the Hellenic Parliament in 1953, with the conservative Greek Rally, when she won a by-election against another female oponent. Women were finally able to participate in the 1956 election, with two more women becoming Members of Parliament, with Lina Tsaldari, wife of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, winning the single most votes in the country and becoming the first female minister in Greece under the conservative National Radical Union government of Konstantinos Karamanlis.



Problems with clientelism in Parliament persisted, with Keith R. Legg going so far as to say that "with the exception of an occasional individual, the Greek political parties and bureaucracy are not committed to any long-range goals (e.g., modernisation), the whole basis of Greek political organisation has been office-holding". The 1961 election was marked with voter suppression against the EDA and the Centre Union in favour of the ruling conservative National Radical Union, including by use of the Hellenic Army, the Hellenic Police, and the CIA, and became known as the "elections of fraud and violence". Karamanlis resigned in 1963 due to the scandal, and two successive elections brought the opposition Centre Union as the largest bloc in parliament; with a plularity in 1963 and a majority in 1964, with 53% of the vote.