With the wounds of a bloody Civil War still open... With the passions inherited from the recent period alive, dividing all political families...

With the party system of the country, in the early post-Civil War years, literally shattered, as countless political formations, often based on personal loyalties, were willing to claim the popular vote...

With the institutional framework of public life still unclear or fragile... With the army seeking an autonomous interventionist role... With the democratic regime being treated with caution by both the victors and the defeated of the Civil War...

The country was certainly not easily governable at least in the early years of the first post-Civil War decade. And its political system often had to compromise with other institutional but also extra-institutional factors, to manage its internal divisions and seek, through many difficulties, a clear orientation.

An orientation that, to some extent, seemed to be found after 1952, when the country entered the period of single-party governments, marking a turning point in both the functioning of the political system and the management of the post-Civil War political climate.

These are the topics that Professor Thanasis Diamandopoulos approaches and analyzes in this issue, the fifth in a series that has already been highly praised by critics.

The 1950s… It began with fragile government structures but was recorded as a period of relative political stability for the most part… Initially marked by an attempt at a military coup, it ended with a sense of relatively established political normalcy (though, of course, the institutional and psychological traces of the bloody Civil War on the country's public life had not disappeared)…

A decade in which fear and anxiety prevailed at the beginning… While towards the end, the expectation for better days had become permissible… An expectation, of course, that seemed to be confirmed in the first half of the next decade but was shattered in the second half of the 1960s…