Greek legislative election, 1956

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The Greek legislative election of the 19 February 1956 resulted in victory for Constantine Karamanlis and his National Radical Union party.

In 1955 was chosen by the King Paul I as successor of prime minister General Alexandros Papagos, who had just died. This controversial decision of the King (Karamanlis was not a leading member of Papagos' party) caused the vehement reactions of the two most prominent members of the Greek Rally party, Stefanos Stefanopoulos and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos.

Nevertheless, Constantine Karamanlis thanks to the support of the royal family and thanks to his own dextrous handlings managed to impose himself as a strong leader. After having stabilised his leadership, he dissolved the Greek Rally and created his own conservative right-wing party, the National Radical Union, which also comprised some prominent centrists (Evangelos Averof, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Konstantinos Tsatsos) and dominated during the next 8 years in the political scene Greece.

The National Radical Union won thanks to the controversial electoral system, passed by Karamanlis, which did not favor the political alliances. As a result, the Democratic Union of Greece| Democratic Union took more votes, but lost the elections, because the National Radical Union was the biggest single party.

The Liberal Democratic Union comprised among others:

• centrists leaded by Georgios Papandreou,
• the Liberal Party, leaded by Sophoklis Venizelos and
• the left-wing EDA , leaded by Dimitrios Pasalidis.

Hence, the non-coherent political alliance of the Liberal Democratic Union lost the elections, although it achieved a slim plurality of votes.

A few years later, Georgios Papandreou and Sophoklis Venizelos denounced their alliance with EDA.

Summary of the 19 February 1956 Greek Parliament election results			Votes			Seats
			No.	%	+− %	No.	+−
	National Radical Union	Constantine Karamanlis	1,594,112	47.38		165
	Liberal Democratic Union	Georgios Papandreou Sophoklis Venizelos Dimitrios Pasalidis	1,620,007	48.15		132
	Progressive Party	Spyros Markezinis	74,545	2.22		-
	People's Social Party		29,375	0.88		-
	Party of Christian Democracy		449	0.01		-
	Lists of Independents		31,022	0.92		3
	Others		14,851	0.44		-
Totals				100.00		300
Constituencies				41		300
Valid votes			3,364,361
Invalid votes			15,084	(0.44%)
Total number of votes			3,379,445	(74,79%)
Valid electorate			4,507,907
Population			7,395,219
Source: Texts of Constitutional History, vol. 2, p. 835.

Greek Parliamentary elections v • d • e

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