April 19, 1956
OPPOSITION IN TATTERS: Opposition parties who had allied themselves during the election campaign to seek the people’s vote against Constantine Karamanlis’s National Radical Union (ERE) were in an uproar yesterday. The situation deteriorated yesterday evening after a threat by Mr Savvas Papapolitis to sue Messrs Sophocles Venizelos, Georgios Kartalis and parliamentary deputy Constantine Mitsotakis for perjury after they had testified that the Democratic Union was a unified party and not an alliance of parties and therefore the leader of the EPEK party, Mr Papapolitis, should have received preferential crosses against his name in order to be legally elected as a parliamentary deputy. The testimony was attributed to the fact that Venizelos and Kartalis wanted Papapolitis’s election to be declared null and void so that EPEK would remain without a leader, forcing its deputies to join the Liberal Democratic Union or the Democratic Party (…) The leader of the Liberals, Mr George Papandreou, had on the other hand testified earlier that the Democratic Union was clearly an alliance of parties.
