The King & the Orator

It was Queen Anne-Marie's 19th birthday, and King Constantine, 25, celebrated it with her and seven-week-old Princess Alexia at his rambling hilltop villa on the western island of Corfu. Then he had to leave the party and fly back to his Athens palace for yet another attempt to resolve the seven-week-old parliamentary crisis.

Falling back on a device used several times by his father, the late King Paul, young Constantine called a "Crown Council," composed of twelve politicians and former Premiers from different parties. Seated in battle uniform at the head of a long table, Constantine began with a speech that was, nominally at least, dictated by his most recent candidate for Premier, Elias Tsirimokos.

Need for Salvation. "I have called you today," Constantine began, "to ask for your opinions on how the political crisis is to be faced. I am deeply anxious because of the serious dangers for the country's economy, the country's international position, the development of the great national question of Cyprus and the internal situation. The acute nature of political passions is undermining and tending to destroy the spiritual unity of the nation."

What Constantine would have liked the council to do was propose a Cabinet of "national salvation," composed of leaders of the 36 dissidents who had bolted the once-dominant Center Union Party, plus representatives of the two minority right-wing parties who together command 107 votes. Such a coalition could try yet again to win away a last essential handful of the 134 Deputies still faithful to the tough old Center Unionist leader, ex-Premier George Papandreou. The politicians, however, were not yet ready to bury their differences. After two sessions in which they expressed their views, the council recessed without taking any action.

The Siren Song. George Papandreou, as leader of the largest party in Parliament, sat through the sessions on Constantine's left hand. He was openly contemptuous of the palace's "lures of power," which, with his orator's gift for a telling phrase, he had likened publicly to those of Circe, Ulysses' sorceress, whose lures transformed men into pigs. "Do you think," he asked Constantine, rhetorically, "that if you can get 115 Deputies in Parliament [i.e., a bare majority], you can face the people and me?" His own siren song consisted of the familiar demand for national elections, which, by way of a compromise, he hinted he was willing to delay until Christmas. Elections are still an unacceptable alternative to the young King, whose very crown might well depend on the success or failure of the kind of oratorical spells that Papandreou could cast over voters in a campaign.

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