Greek Civil War - 1936.

Cook

Cook

Banned
The Spanish Civil War started with an attempted coup on 17 July 1936. Three weeks later the Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas, in response to widespread industrial unrest and the growing popularity of the Greek Communist Party, declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and unleashed a regime that crushed dissent, political freedoms and civil rights.

Given that Metaxas had been appointed Prime Minister in April 1936 by the king despite the fact that he was only the leader of a minor party in the coalition government and ostensibly to block the growing power of the Communists, his subsequent actions on the 4th of August amounted to an internal coup and could have been foreseen, could we have had a Greek Civil War break out in response?
 

Some Bloke

Maybe Mussolini intervenes to create a puppet state (after having finished in Ethiopia), leaving Spain the the Germans. Could lead to tensions within the Axis.
 

Andreas

The problem is that the Greek people at the time were fed up with the conflicts between the Popular party and the Venizelists, and that's why they tolerated the Metaxas' regime. In short, in the mid-1930's the political situation was not going to end up in a civil war. It took Occupation, the flight of the political class to middle East and the creation and prevailance of EAM together with the British intervention to create the preconditions for a Civil war. In 1936 the Communist party was too weak to form a solid and popular body, and also there were not armed people to fight a civil war.
 

cimon

Andreas,
The Communists had acted earlier than that,inciting seddition amongst the new middle east army recruits that started in the training camps in Syria...

and Some Bloke may be right since Metaxas had counted that as a possibility,however remote...
 
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