All 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament 151 seats needed for a majority
First party
Second party
Leader
Konstantinos Karamanlis
Georgios Papandreou
Party
ERE
DE
Seats won
165
132
Popular vote
1,594,112
1,620,007
Percentage
47.38%
48.15%
Prime Minister before election
Konstantinos Karamanlis
ERE
Prime Minister after election
Konstantinos Karamanlis
ERE
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Parliamentary elections were held in Greece on 19 February 1956.[1] The result was a victory for Konstantinos Karamanlis and his National Radical Union (ERE) by securing the electoral vote despite trailing in the popular vote, due to gerrymandering employed by ERE. It was the first general election in Greece in which women had the right to vote although women had first voted in a by-election in Thessaloniki Prefecture in 1953 in which the first female MP was elected.
Although the Democratic Union, a coalition of centrist parties, received a slim plurality of votes, the conservative governing party, the National Radical Union, won the most seats due to a complex and controversial electoral system enacted by Karamanlis. A "first past the post" system was applied in the rural constituencies where the ERE was expected to gain a plurality, while proportional representation was reserved for the urban constituencies, where the Democratic Union was expected to lead.[2][3] As a result, the Democratic Union came up 19 seats short of a majority.
The Democratic Union included centrist parties, as the Liberal Democratic Union led by Sophoklis Venizelos and the Liberal Party of Georgios Papandreou, as well as the left-wing EDA, led by Ioannis Passalidis. A few years later, Sophoklis Venizelos and Georgios Papandreou renounced their alliance with EDA, breaking up the Democratic Union.
^Dieter Nohlen & Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A data handbook, p830 ISBN 978-3-8329-5609-7
^Grilla, Michael (2007-05-22). "Ο εκλογικός νόμος". www.eleftheria.gr. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2022-12-07.
^""Το Βήμα" newspaper, 12 Nov 2000, "Δημοκρατία Διάτρητη" (In Greek)". Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2007-08-26.
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