An Irreverent Phenomenon

Many Greeks say that King Constantine chose Panayotis Kanellopoulos to head a new Greek Cabinet last week because Kanellopoulos has no children. The significance of the remark is that the new Premier's chief rival, George Papandreou, 79, a former Premier of Greece and the head of the powerful Center Union Party, is the father of the enfant terrible of Greek politics. His son Andreas, 48, who sits in the Greek Parliament, is the King's most relentless critic, an unpredictable, highly ambitious leftist who once headed the department of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Though George Papandreou's party polled an unprecedented 53% of the vote in Greece's 1964 elections, he was forced out as Premier after 17 months when Son Andreas was accused of being part of a traitorous conspiracy known as Aspida.

Sizable Following. Since the elder Papandreou's party has continued to have a large plurality in Parliament even after his resignation, Greece has had to get along ever since with caretaker governments. The last one, led by Banker loannis Paraskevopoulos, was formed to carry the country through elections planned for late May. But Andreas' alleged activities brought down that government, too. His foes charged that he was the grey eminence behind Aspida (meaning shield), a plot in which a group of junior army officers sought in 1965 to install a socialist regime. Fifteen officers were jailed after a trial, and the government seemed ready to arrest Andreas when Parliament's current session closed and his immunity ended. To forestall this, the Center Union Party introduced a motion to extend the immunity to cover the period between Parliament's adjournment this month and the May elections. Kanellopoulos and his rightist National Radical Union balked at this plan and withdrew their support from the caretaker government. That brought it down.

After 20 years in the U.S., Andreas Papandreou returned to Greece in 1961 to enter politics, soon earned a reputation for irreverence that gave him a sizable following among students and intellectuals. Kanellopoulos says of him: "We have never had such a phenomenon in Greece." Andreas' own father calls him "an arithmetical problem: he adds little, subtracts votes, multiplies problems and divides the party." The two often clash on issues, but blood keeps them in the same camp.

Path of Wickedness. Kanellopoulos (pronounced Can-nel-/op-o-luss), 65, is also a former professor. A onetime teacher of sociology at Athens University, he has been in and out of Greek politics for more than 40 years. He is the heir to ex-Premier Constantine Karamanlis, who was also deplored by the left. The elder Papandreou charged that in choosing Kanellopoulos the King had chosen "the path of wickedness." His party's newspaper warned of the possibility of a dictatorship, and promised that in such a case "the people will mobilize massively to overthrow the regime." At week's end crowds of pro-Papandreou students chanting "Andreas" and antimonarchist slogans clashed with police in Athens and Salonika.

With emotions running high, Kanellopoulos will find it difficult to hold together a government--especially since his party controls only 101 of the 300 seats in Parliament. The King also gave him the option of dissolving Parliament and holding elections this month. But Kanellopoulos is not eager to close Parliament until it passes a proportional-representation bill that will cut the Papandreous' strength at the polls.

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