Venizelos becomes prime minister of Greece

On 26 June 1917 Eleftherios Venizelos formed a new government of Greece. Less than two years after he lost power for the second time, and nine months after he left Athens to head the provisional government in Salonika, he was returning as prime minister of the whole country. Two days earlier, on 24 June, Alexandros Zaimis had resigned. This sequence of dates is given by a British chronology of the war and by the British journalist George F. Abbott. According to the American yearbook New International Year Book, the king accepted Zaimis’s resignation on 25 June. The new cabinet was sworn in on 27 June, that is 14 June by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, and Greek lists of governments count it from that day.

A transitional period

After King Constantine stepped down on 12 June, Zaimis remained in office. According to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls), this was what Venizelos himself wanted: before his return to Athens there was to be a short transitional period that would allow passions to cool. The French high commissioner, Charles Jonnart, who had carried out the abdication, meanwhile forced the expulsion from the country of a group of politicians and officers regarded as Germanophiles. The list was published on 20 June. On the same day the young King Alexander assured Zaimis in a letter that he would be a faithful guardian of the constitution, which was meant to efface the bad impression made by his first proclamation, in which he had promised to follow in his father’s footsteps.

On 21 June Venizelos sailed from Salonika to Piraeus aboard a French warship. According to Current History, a crowd of several thousand welcomed him. He publicly asserted that he did not want to seize power himself, and that matters were to be settled by a commission made up of ministers of both governments, the Athens and the Salonika one. Jonnart, who formally acted only as adviser and mediator, approved the idea.

A revived chamber

In practice, however, the question of power was already decided. Venizelos was to return at once, but under the constitution he needed the support of parliament. New elections were out of the question. Falls notes that they would not have covered the whole country, because eastern Macedonia was occupied by the Bulgarians and Epirus by the Italians. Abbott adds that Venizelos could not be sure of a majority. It was therefore decided to restore the chamber elected on 13 June 1915, in which the Liberals had a majority and which Constantine had dissolved in the autumn of that year. The Venizelists and the French regarded that dissolution as unlawful. On 24 June Jonnart put this demand to Zaimis. The prime minister refused to take responsibility for it and resigned. Abbott and the Greek royalist Cosmetatos, both unfriendly to Venizelos, regarded the revival of the old chamber as a blatant violation of the constitution.

Jonnart obtained from King Alexander an assurance that he would entrust the government to Venizelos. The news spread quickly, and coincided with the return of the yacht Sfaktiria, which had taken Constantine to Italy. On the evening of 24 June the yacht’s crew, together with students and reservists, marched through the streets of Athens with a portrait of the former king, cheering him. The French general Regnault, commander of the troops landed at Piraeus, responded with force: at dawn on 25 June his troops with artillery occupied the hills around the city.

The new cabinet

In these conditions Venizelos completed his cabinet on 26 June. He himself also took the ministry of war. Foreign affairs were taken on by the lawyer and diplomat Nikolaos Politis, the interior by the prime minister’s closest collaborator Emmanouil Repoulis, finance by Miltiadis Negrepontis, agriculture by Andreas Michalakopoulos, and the navy by Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis, until then a member of the Salonika triumvirate. According to Abbott, Venizelos asked for two days’ delay in order to bring his ministers from Salonika. Nor was he in a hurry to enter Athens, until General Regnault demanded clear instructions from him. The prime minister then admitted that it would always be said anyway that he had returned only thanks to the support of the Allies.

The next day, 27 June, Venizelos entered the capital and took the oath before King Alexander. The government in Salonika ceased to exist, and for the first time since the autumn of 1916 Greece once again had a single government. No one doubted that the new government would quickly bring the country into the war on the side of the Entente. The chamber of 1915 met again in July. Its opponents mockingly called it the “Lazarus chamber”, because it had been raised from the dead.