ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
The economic council was made up of 60 members with the ‘representatives of capital’
playing a dominant role. The workers and public employees were assigned five seats.
Nevertheless, the 1931 constitution, and the ‘limited pluralist’ elections that followed
institutionalized a dominant party, clientelist and hybrid regime. In 1934, King Alexander was
assassinated in France and Yugoslavia returned to a semi-democratic path.
The ‘Fourth of August’ regime in Greece, was established in the wake of a coup d’état led by
the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, who was head of a small conservative, anti-
parliamentary and royalist party. Metaxas did not create a single party following the
dissolution of parliament and the political parties, as this would have been difficult for the
king to accept; however, he did place great hope in the creation of an official youth
organization, the National Youth Organization (EON – Ethnikí Orgánosis Neoléas), which was
inspired by the fascist model. A few weeks after the 1936 coup, Metaxas’s programme was
clear, ‘the old parliamentary system has vanished forever… with its 14th point indicating “the
remodelling of society by easy stages on a corporatist national basis so that a truly national
representation may emerge”. In early October 1936, he stated his intention to proceed
to ‘a carefully and methodically organized, over a period of time and gradually, organization
of [Greek] society along corporatist lines [that will become] the basis for a carefully theorized
and planned system of a corporatist national assembly that would be in accordance with the
interests of the whole nation’ In 1937, he ‘drew up plans for … an all-powerful corporate
state’ In fact, the regime embarked on a ‘programme of “horizontal” restructuring of
economic and labour relations in a pattern that revealed the influence of the Italian Fascist
and Portuguese Salazarist experiments with corporatism, with this latter being particularly
evident in his plans for constitutional reform The plans became more concrete when
Metaxas designed a new system of national delegation supported by two bodies: the
supreme council of national labour and the assembly of the professions, paving the way for
the institutionalization of corporatism as a system of political representation. According
to several sources, the king’s opposition to corporatist representation led to the
postponement of the project, but Metaxas’s own changes to the new constitution project
highlights his own hesitation on his institutional project.
Corporatism and the presidential dictatorships of the Baltic countries
The construction of personalized authoritarian regimes in the young Baltic countries was
rapid. In 1926, a military coup d’état in Lithuania brought Antanas Smetona to power, while in
1934 an almost syncretic series of coups led to the institutionalization of presidentialist
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