page_title: Ioannis Metaxas
section_title: Exile and Interwar political career
hierarchical_section_title: Ioannis Metaxas / Exile and Interwar political career
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: tiré du journal "le miroir".
context_page_description: Ioannis Metaxas was a Greek military officer and politician, serving as Prime Minister of Greece from 1936 until his death in 1941. He governed constitutionally for the first four months of his tenure, and thereafter as the strongman of the 4th of August Regime.
  Born to an aristocratic family in Ithaca, Metaxas took part in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Balkan Wars, quickly rising through the ranks of the Hellenic Army. A royalist during the National Schism, Metaxas unsuccessfully opposed Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and Greece's entry in World War I; as a result, he was exiled to Corsica in 1917. On his return, Metaxas moved into politics and founded the Freethinkers' Party, but had only limited success under the Hellenic Republic. The Greek monarchy was restored in 1935, and Metaxas was appointed Prime Minister in April 1936. On 4 August 1936, with the support of King George II, Metaxas initiated a self-coup and established an authoritarian, nationalist and anti-communist regime.
  Metaxas attempted to maintain Greek neutrality early in the Second World War.
context_section_description: With the coming of Venizelos in power, in summer 1917, Metaxas  with other notable antivenizelists, were exiled to Corsica, from where he escaped to Sardinia (with Gounaris and Pesmazoglou) and later found himself with his family to Siena, Italy, while King Constantine with the royal family left for Switzerland. In January 1920, Metaxas was sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the Noemvriana.
  He returned to Greece in November 1920, after the electoral defeat of Eleftherios Venizelos. He was reinstated in the army with the rank of Major General, but as he opposed the continued Greek campaign in Asia Minor, he resigned and went into retirement on 28 December 1920. He subsequently repeatedly rejected the military leadership of the Greek army offered to him by Constantine. As a soldier, Metaxas argued that Greece did not have logistical capacity nor the economic resources to support an army in the interior of Anatolia, and the decision by his patron, King Constantine, to continue the war against Turkey caused a rift between the two. Following the defeat of Greek forces in Asia Minor, King Constantine was again forced into exile by the 11 September 1922 Revolution, this time led by Col. Nikolaos Plastiras. Metaxas moved into politics and founded the Freethinkers' Party on 12 October 1922.
  However, his association with the failed royalist Leonardopoulos-Gargalidis coup attempt in October 1923 forced him to flee again the country. Soon after, King George II (son of Constantine I) was also forced into exile. The monarchy was abolished, and the Second Hellenic Republic was proclaimed, in March 1924.
  Metaxas returned to Greece soon after, publicly stating his acceptance of the Republic regime. Despite a promising start, and his status as one of the most prominent royalist politicians, Metaxas' foray into politics was not very successful. In the 1926 elections, his Freethinkers' Party claimed 15.78% of the vote and 52 seats in Parliament, putting it almost on a par with the other main royalist party, the People's Party. As a result, Metaxas became Communications Minister in the "ecumenical government" formed under Alexandros Zaimis.
  However, infighting within the party and the departure of many members plunged the party to 5.3% and a single seat in the 1928 elections. The 1932 and 1933 elections saw the percentage drop to 1.59%, although the party still returned three MPs, and Metaxas became Interior Minister in the Panagis Tsaldaris cabinet. Metaxas was regarded as the most intransigent and extreme of all the royalist politicians and his open hostility to parliamentary government as useless might perhaps explain the relative failure of his parliamentary career. By 1933, even the officially monarchist Populist Party had tacitly came to accept the republic as much as the Liberals as both the Populist and Liberal leaders wanted a system that guaranteed the possibility of orderly change and the rule of law, and Metaxas's call for something resembling an absolute monarchy put him out of the mainstream of Greek politics. In 1933, there was a failed assassination attempt against Venizelos, which Metaxas praised in his newspaper Hellenki, expressing regret only that the attempt failed. The would-be assassins were never arrested, but Metaxas's editorial stance led to widespread suspicions both at the time and since that he was involved, through no definitive evidence has ever emerged.
  On 1 March 1935, in Thessaloniki there was an attempted coup d'état by Venizelist officers ostensibly over the slow pace of the investigation into the attempted assassination, which almost succeeded. Thessaloniki together with the rest of Greek Macedonia had taken in the bulk of the about 1.3 million Greeks expelled from Turkey in the compulsory population exchange of 1923, and the majority of the refugees lived in extreme poverty with those living in rural areas making their living picking tobacco. The collapse of international tobacco prices in the Great Depression lowered living conditions even more and Macedonia was the region of Greece hit wors
caption: Metaxas with other political opponents of Venizelos go in exile, summer 1917
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