Venizelos resigns again

On 5 October 1915 (22 September in the Julian calendar, which Greece then used) King Constantine I told Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos that he could not support his policy. A few hours earlier Parliament had given the government a vote of confidence. Venizelos resigned, for the second time that year. In March he had stepped down when the king rejected Greek participation in the Dardanelles operation. This time the issue was the alliance with Serbia, and the resignation came on the day that Entente troops landed at Salonika, brought in at the prime minister’s request.

The speech in Parliament

The crisis played out in Parliament, which had met at the end of September. On 4 October the former prime ministers Stefanos Dragoumis, Dimitrios Rallis, Georgios Theotokis and Dimitrios Gounaris protested one after another against the Allied landing at Salonika. Theotokis argued that the Greek-Serbian alliance of 1913 had lapsed when Serbia, under Entente pressure, agreed to cede to Bulgaria part of the lands it had won in the Second Balkan War. Venizelos answered with a long speech. He defended the validity of the treaty and ended with words which, as the British journalist Crawfurd Price, who was present in the chamber, wrote, echoed throughout Europe: “If the Great Powers, relying on their strength, can afford to violate treaty obligations, Greece is too small a state to commit so great an infamy.” He added that Greece had no direct quarrel with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but if in the Balkans she found herself facing other powers, she would act as her honour dictated.

Asked what he would do if, going to Serbia’s aid, he met the German and Austrian armies, Venizelos replied that if necessary they would have to be fought too. The debate lasted until four in the morning and ended in a vote of confidence in the government’s policy. According to Price, 142 deputies voted for it and 102 against. Most deputies voted in the belief that the king agreed with the prime minister. Earlier Venizelos had obtained Constantine’s consent to a statement that the Crown agreed with the government not only on mobilisation but also on future policy. He had then argued to the king that otherwise mobilisation would make no impression on the Bulgarians.

The audience with the king

Constantine thought otherwise. According to the British official historian Julian Corbett, when the prime minister came to the palace to report on the debate, he was told that he had exceeded his authority in his speech and that, despite the vote of confidence, the king could not support his ministers’ policy. According to Price, even before signing the mobilisation decree the king had decided that he would not fight Germany, even if Bulgaria joined her. Price supposed that on the morning of 5 October the German minister had called on the king to protest against the prime minister’s words, but he was not sure of it. The audience with the king was, as he wrote, stormy. Venizelos’s biographer Vincent Seligman writes that at one in the afternoon the prime minister was formally dismissed. Greek lists give the end of his government as 24 September in the Julian calendar, that is 7 October, when the new cabinet was sworn in.

The constitution gave the king the right to dismiss the government, and Venizelos did not want to start a dispute over its limits. According to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign, he judged that if he stayed in power against the will of the king and the general staff, Greece would face civil war. Seligman argued that three quarters of the country would have backed him, but part of the army, many former ministers and most of the general staff would have sided with the king. In a fratricidal struggle the Bulgarians could have attacked a divided Greece.

The Zaimis government

The king entrusted the task of forming a government to Alexandros Zaimis, a respected politician outside the main camps. His cabinet consisted mainly of Venizelos’s opponents, and the new government was to maintain armed neutrality. Venizelos’s Liberals, however, still had a majority in Parliament and promised Zaimis their support, so as not to complicate the country’s position at so dangerous a moment. The dispute between the prime minister and the king, under way since March, was now out in the open. In the following years it grew into the conflict the Greeks called the National Schism.