The historian Thanos Veremis delves into significant moments of our recent political history, some of which may be less known. Patterns such as the division and conflicts of conservative and radical populism consistently resurface.

World War I did not end in 1918 for Greece, but rather in 1922. This extension was disastrous for a society exposed to division. Moreover, the arrival of 1,300,000 refugees in 1922-23 pushed the newcomers, who settled in urban centers, to join the radicalism of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Thanks to the outcasts of the Catastrophe, the Left gained strength to resist the occupier during the Occupation as well as the parliamentary majority of the post-war state.

The Civil War was militarily won by a center-right state, but the peace was also influenced by the defeated. The reaction of right-wing professionals, who were now threatened with exclusion from the operation of the system after the attempted reassembly of the divided society by the Center Union, triggered the imposition of an unexpected military dictatorship.

The conservative party found a new mission after 1974 thanks to the modernization imposed on politics by Konstantinos Karamanlis. His distinction between right-wing populism and the beneficial influence of the European Common Market on Greek issues became his most significant contribution to post-junta Greece.

The successor of Andreas Papandreou, Costas Simitis, managed to adapt European modernization and strengthen Greece's relationship with the European Union through the country's entry into the Economic and Monetary Union. After the five-year term of SYRIZA-ANEL in power, the goal is to free Greece from the disastrous divisive legacies of the past.