The 1980s marked the definitive end of what was inherited –both positive and negative– in the country's political system, in terms of mentality, operation, and institutions, from the civil war and post-civil war period.

It was the end of the state of the civil war victors, the end of the political reality that tolerated power alternation only among factions of the so-called nationalistic camp (and this within limits, as the 1960s demonstrated). But it was also the end of fiscal prudence, the end of the education-based social hierarchy, the end of the westward orientation of the country.

All of this continued until the force of reality led to the incorporation of PASOK into the system it had challenged, simply enriched with some modernization institutions and tainted by some new morbid sources...