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The Trikoupis Reforms
The politician Kharilaos Trikoupis
began to address the problem of gridlock in 1869. After Trikoupis
wrote a newspaper article identifying the king's toleration of
minority governments in 1874 (and after the writer's arrest for
treason), the king agreed that a government could be formed only by
the leader of the strongest party in parliament. If no party could
obtain the pledged support of a plurality, then the king would
dissolve parliament and call for a general election. The result of
this reform was a relatively stable twenty-five-year period at the end
of the century, in which only seven general elections were held.
Trikoupis and his arch-rival Theodoros
Deliyannis were the dominant political figures of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century--Trikoupis the Westernizer and modernizer,
Deliyannis the traditionalist and strong advocate of irredentism.
Trikoupis saw Greece as needing to develop economically, become more
liberal socially, and develop its military strength in order to become
a truly "modern" state. During his terms as prime minister
in the 1880s (altogether he served seven terms, interspersed with the
first three of Deliyannis's five terms), Trikoupis made major economic
and social reforms that pushed Greece significantly to develop in
these ways.
Trikoupis emphasized expansion of
Greece's export sector and its chief support elements--the
transportation network and agricultural cultivation. In the last
decades of the 1800s, agricultural reforms, which were only moderately
successful, aimed at increasing the purchasing power of the rural
population as well as fostering large estates that could raise
production of export commodities and improve Greece's chronic balance
of payments deficit. However, land-allotment patterns failed to raise
most peasants above the level of subsistence farming, and foreclosures
of peasant properties created large estates whose single-crop
contributions made the Greek agricultural export structure quite
fragile.
Between 1875 and 1895, steamship
tonnage under Greek ownership rose by a factor of about sixteen.
Industrialization, especially textile production, also developed under
the paternal eye of the Trikoupis government. Between 1875 and 1900,
the steam horsepower of Greek plants increased by over 250 percent. In
addition, by greatly expanding public education, Trikoupis fostered a
new cultural climate that drew on Western trends in dress,
architecture, art and manners.
The only engine to drive such reform
programs was extensive foreign loans. By 1887 some 40 percent of
government expenditures went to servicing the national debt. Trikoupis
levied taxes and import tariffs on numerous commodities, increased the
land tax, and established government monopolies on salt and matches.
The sustained deficits incurred through
the 1880s set up an economic collapse in the 1890s. When the price of
currants, the chief agricultural export, collapsed in 1893, the
national economy collapsed as well. By 1897 Greece was bankrupt, and
its age of reform, which yielded many beneficial and permanent
changes, had ended.
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