Fresh Start

The clear, sun-washed air of Greece, where the word democracy was first heard, has been ringing for two months with the campaign cries of politicians. In small cafees through the countryside, customers have looked up from their timeless card games and eternal sipping of Turkish coffee and resin-flavored wine to make caustic or approving esthetic judgments on the rhetorical flourishes of candidates.

The hardest-working candidate of all, and the one with most at stake, was handsome former Premier Constantine Karamanlis, 51. Despite fever, coughs and stomachaches, he had traveled some 4,000 miles across Greece by plane, train, ship and car, raised his stentorian voice in all but six of the 55 electoral districts in Greece. Karamanlis had brought on the new elections himself by resigning his premiership as an answer to dissidents in his own party whose defection cost him his parliamentary majority. Under a caretaker government appointed by his strong supporter King Paul. Karamanlis helped ram through a new electoral law (Greece's fourth since the end of World War II) designed to strengthen the two-party system and to cut down on the splinter groups that proliferate in a nation that takes its political differences seriously.

Karamanlis had in his favor Greece's relative prosperity, and his own reputation as a good administrator. His critics accused him of being too much in palace favor and too pro-American. All parties insisted on independence for British-run Cyprus, but Karamanlis had tried to keep this passionate subject muted. Long after midnight the results came in. Karamanlis and his National Radical Union finished well out front, but the big surprise was the strong showing of the Communist E.D.A., eight years after the ugly civil war against Communist guerrillas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.