Democracy in dark times: Hopeful lessons from Greece’s 50-year odyssey

Afroditi Xydi is the executive director of the Deon Policy Institute. Georgios Laskaris is the president of the Deon Policy Institute.

As the world grapples with two major wars and an unprecedented crisis across its democratic institutions, it may come as a surprise that today’s Greece could offer hard-earned lessons for how democracies can persist.

This year, Greece marks its 50th anniversary of restored democracy, after a seven-year military junta collapsed following Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in July 1974. The ensuing period — known as “Metapolitefsi” — aimed to restore the country’s democracy and preserve its national independence. In a year where half the world is voting, Greece’s half-century journey underscores the resilience and adaptability required to maintain democracy, reboot an economy, and reforge geopolitical alliances.

The last five decades have by no means been easy or straightforward for Greek democracy. Following a dictatorship marked by torture, the exclusion of perceived communists and the arbitrary stripping of citizenship, Greece made a strong start on its democratic path. In this new era, the country reestablished the rule of law and individual liberties. It legalized all parties — including the previously outlawed Communist Party — organized free elections, abolished the monarchy and crafted a new liberal constitution.

Greece then joined the European Economic Community (EEC) — the EU’s predecessor — in 1981, and adopted the euro in 2001. Quality of life across the country improved dramatically: In 1974, 33 percent of the population hadn’t graduated from primary school, 40 percent were farmers and 64 percent of streets still weren’t covered in asphalt. But by 2008, Greek living standards were at par with developed nations.

However, as 2008’s Great Recession rippled through Europe, it revealed the unsustainable debt of Greece’s public sector, leading to a devastating financial crisis that cost the country 26 percent of its GDP. However, after negotiating austerity measures, restructuring its debt, receiving bailouts and rationalizing its public budget, Greece is now one of the EU’s fastest-growing economies — though still one of its least productive.

So, what lessons can be distilled from this 50-year democratic experiment?

Firstly, democracy can be maintained if the populist trap can be avoided. Greece’s democracy flourished in the years following its dictatorship. This unprecedented political stability was built on functional bipartisanship, and it was also enabled by a borrowed prosperity model. But as the 2008 crisis deepened, Greek voters turned to fringe parties, and the evident power asymmetry within the EU only fueled the threat of populism.

Even while Greece was on the brink of bankruptcy, however, the country’s EU membership remained non-negotiable, preserving democracy and avoiding a possible Grexit. And by 2019, the pendulum swung back toward the center, with the election of a center-right government given a mandate of deep reforms, bound by rationalized spending.

In the last five years, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party helped put the country on a recovery path. | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images

Looking back at this time, it’s evident that unsustainable growth will lead to a severe financial crisis, yet recovery is possible when paired with economic openness.

During Metapolitefsi, Greece shifted away from agriculture and industry toward a service-based economy with a large public sector, low knowledge-content exports, and high presence of small-medium enterprises. The country’s low interest rates, and the lack of accountability from its European peers, meant it borrowed excessively to fund its growth without achieving EU-level productivity. And the crisis that followed brought record-high unemployment (28 percent) and extreme poverty (18 percent).

However, it also crystallized the need for private-sector-led growth. After its populist experiment, under new leadership, Greece increased foreign direct investment, exports and regained its investment grade status to reach a 5.6 percent GDP growth rate in 2022.

Greece’s journey also demonstrates that with a lurking threat at bay, values-based alliances are necessary. During the military junta, Greece was isolated and had few allies. Yet, after democracy was restored, its preservation became interlinked with national independence, and to solidify the country’s adherence to the West — as well as protect the West’s interests in the East — Greece joined the EEC. Peace still prevails today, despite heightened tensions with Turkey. And the country now uses its strategic location to provide supply routes for the wars in Ukraine and Israel and energy to the region.

Finally, no government can stop thinking about tomorrow. In the last five years, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party helped put the country on a recovery path. But make no mistake, challenges still exist.

Like many other European nations, Greece is currently experiencing a polarization in its politics. The country’s political ecosystem must restabilize and foster parties that can credibly govern rather than a proliferation of small parties. Meanwhile, measures are being implemented to increase real wages and output, yet pre-crisis prosperity levels still seem unachievable in the near future.

As it stands, the current administration needs to pursue deeper economic reforms to incentivize high-value economic sectors, enable more innovation and improve tertiary education. Concurrently, it needs to redesign its checks and balances. Here, the government’s upcoming constitutional revision presents an opportunity to keep the prime-minister-centric executive in check via stronger legislative and judiciary branches, as well as an effective press. Lastly, Greece should continue turning its complicated security situation into an asset by leading EU-wide security arrangements, both internally and externally.

As geopolitical tensions rise and Western democracies face growing risk, Greece’s milestone cements that only democracy and international cooperation can provide solutions to 21st-century challenges. The words  of Pavlos Bakoyannis — the liberal Greek lawmaker who paid for his devotion to democracy with his own life — still resonate today: “In democracy, there are no dead ends.”