Greece’s return to parliamentary democracy wasn’t accompanied by checks, balances

In April of 1947, in the midst of the civil war, the leader of the Nationalist Party (renamed People's Party in 1920), Theodoros Tourkovasilis, while speaking to the Greek Parliament, mentioned Switzerland in passing: "I was recently given the chance to admire this people and to see the fine organization of this state up close. Switzerland is indeed a masterpiece of a state. There, in Switzerland, there exists not communism, not socialism, not syndicalism, nothing at all that ends in '-ism.'"

Tourkovasilis (1891-1975) was no run-of-the-mill politician. Born in Arcadia, the descendant of a family of fighters in the 1821 Greek Revolution, he was a typical monarchist nationalist, with views that would today be considered far-right. Having repeatedly served as a minister in the inter-war period, he was also a friend of Ioannis Metaxas (PM and dictator of Greece from 1936 until...