Zaimis government resigns

The British chronology of the war records under 5 November 1915 the resignation of the Greek prime minister, Alexandros Zaimis. It had, however, been decided a day earlier. According to the Greek parliamentary records and American press reports, the Chamber of Deputies voted in the early hours of 4 November, or 22 October by the Julian calendar, which Greece then used, and the prime minister announced the resignation of the cabinet immediately after the result was declared. The government, which had been formed at the beginning of October after the second resignation of Eleftherios Venizelos, had lasted less than a month.

The incident with the war minister

The Zaimis cabinet was a minority government. The majority in the chamber was still held by Venizelos’s Liberals, who had so far merely tolerated the government. The crisis began over a minor matter. On 3 November the chamber was considering a bill by the war minister, General Ioannis Yannakitsas, raising the pay of officers of the mobilised army. The Liberal deputy Georgios Vlachos attacked not only the bill but also the minister himself: he declared that it was the deputies, not the minister, who represented the nation, and that the bill had been brought in “without shame”. The offended general replied that in that case he had no business in the chamber, and walked out. At the Speaker’s request Vlachos withdrew his offensive words and apologised, but Venizelos regarded the minister’s walkout as an insult to the chamber and demanded an apology. Zaimis replied that the general’s conduct had not slighted parliament, and made the matter a question of confidence in the government.

The night debate

The dispute over wounded dignity quickly turned into a debate on foreign policy. All the party leaders spoke, and Venizelos took the floor twice. He defended his policy and deplored the fact that Greece was allowing Bulgaria, its age-old enemy, to crush its ally Serbia, after which it might turn against Greece itself. Asked by a government deputy whether he thought the King wanted the ruin of the country, he replied that this was absurd, but that in a constitutional state it was the government, not the Crown, that bore responsibility. The King had had the right to disagree with the cabinet once, when he believed that it did not express the will of the nation, but after the June elections, which the Liberals had won, he could not do so again on the same issue. He was tolerating the Zaimis government only because of the deadlock created by the Crown, and this should not be mistaken for support. Rather than calling elections during mobilisation, he said, it would be better to suspend the constitution until the end of the war, so that it would be clear who was responsible for what.

The vote took place at about four or five in the morning of 4 November. The chamber adopted a Liberal motion stating that the government’s explanations of the incident were inadequate and expressing regret. Of the 264 deputies present, 147 voted for the motion and 114 against, while the ministers, in accordance with custom, abstained. Zaimis declared that his government had lost the confidence of the chamber and was resigning, and the Speaker, Konstantinos Zavitsianos, adjourned the sitting until the new cabinet was sworn in. Venizelos had won, although according to Paxton Hibben, an American journalist sympathetic to the King, his majority was already clearly smaller than after the June elections.

Who wanted the crisis

Even then it was not clear who had really brought it about. The British author G.F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the King, wrote that two versions circulated in Athens: that Venizelos’s opponents had been looking for a pretext to get rid of a chamber hostile to them, or that Venizelos himself had wanted to bring down a cabinet that had managed to establish decent relations with the Entente. Abbott considered both plausible. The Liberals hoped that the King would entrust power to their leader. King Constantine I, however, decided to dissolve the chamber and call elections. He asked Zaimis to remain in office and conduct them, but Zaimis refused. The choice fell on the aged banker and diplomat Stefanos Skouloudis, who took office on 7 November, keeping almost the whole of the previous government, including General Yannakitsas. For the Allies the change was disturbing: a prime minister regarded as a friend of the Entente was leaving, and at Salonika its soldiers were still waiting to learn whether Greece would remain benevolently neutral towards them.