The idiom of Eleftherios Venizelos

Eleftherios Venizelos relied on his capacity as a charismatic leader, and through his successive transformations (particularly in the period 1928-30) endeavoured to articulate a modern idiom in both economy and administration. However, within society, at a time when the idiom of the working class was gaining ground in the left, under the pressure of the bourgeois classes he was representing he ended up expressing a more conservative idiom, "to confront the evils of the parliamentary system".

Seen from another angle, from the period of the Balkan Wars until 1930 the idiom of Venizelism and his supporters was a vehicle for the incorporation of the new countries and their populations into the administrative mechanism of old Greece.

The acceptance of Venizelos' idiom by the refugees is worth noting, despite the collapse of his irredentist vision. The economic crisis of 1929, the threat of 'social revolution', and other factors like the gradual disappearance of the landowning class, brought the idiom of the great leader closer to his old opponents and pushed even radicals in his own party into a virtual withdrawal. In addition, the rapprochement with Turkey (1930) and the placatory language used by Venizelos, deprived his party - if only temporarily -of the vote of a crucial refugee percentage at the beginning of 1930s. It is characteristic that in 1935 the Liberal party recognized restoration and a year later consented to concede power to Metaxas.