In Greece, anti-fascist sentiment is deeply rooted in the country’s history of resistance against Nazi occupation, civil war, and successive military dictatorships. More recently, the rise of far-right groups like Golden Dawn, and the authoritarian shift in US politics has seen a resurgence in anti-fascist rhetoric and organisation. It’s reasonable to argue that progressive political movements in Greece, in all of their diversity, continue to find an important reference in the anti-fascist history of the country. This applies equally well to women’s and feminist movements, past and present, branches of which have clung to the leftist anti-fascist legacy, while others fought for an autonomous politics akin to Anglo-American feminisms. As in many countries, the anti-fascist template was set in Greece in the context of mass popular resistance to Nazi occupation, but its continuing resonance in Greek political culture is inextricably linked with social justice, and the long memory of institutionalised state violence and resistance to it.
The tri-partite Axis occupation of Greece (1941-44) gave rise to the largest resistance movement of the period, the communist-led Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo/ EAM (National Liberation Front) and its military wing Ethnikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos / ELAS(National Liberation Army). While communist-led, EAM/ELAS built a broad coalition unified by shared pain and the struggle for national liberation; it enabled the movement to cut across class and gender barriers. Importantly, it began the process of altering communal beliefs regarding women’s participation in the public sphere. For example, conservative peasants could be more easily asked to accept the mobilisation of girls and women, as part of a greater project to strike against German troops who planned to steal or burn their crops.
Moreover, the framework of defensive nationalism capacitated gendered imagery to become commonplace. Imagery included that of armed and uniformed women marching into villages, the ceremonial burial of fallen women fighters and of boys and girls working alongside each other. The context was ripe for deeper social reform. EAM’s anti-fascism was conceived as, or at least adhered to, a norm for populist movements which, according to Nicos Mouzelis’s definition, ‘partly involves drawing into the political arena people hitherto excluded from it or admitted to it only marginally’; a philosophy that was moulded by EAM leaders to fit the specific contours of the Greek setting.1
The EAM leadership which comprised of both communists and liberals, at least until 1943, shared a vision as to how the new society, or ‘popular democracy’ as it was referred to, would be brought into existence. This included emergent mobilisational narratives addressing the disenfranchised, including thousands of young rural and working-class girls and boys, women and the peasantry, members of ethnic minorities and other groups hitherto situated outside the system of ‘political clientelism’, which governed Greek war politics since independence. It created a mass following, which numbered at least 1.5 million by 1944. Moreover, by the end of the occupation the majority of Greek women and girls had participated in some kind of Resistance activity. No other Resistance organisation appealed to or drew women into its ranks in more than negligible numbers.
The popular success of the EAM movement culminated in the formation of a quasi-governmental regime, the Politiki Epitropi Ethnikis Andistasis / PEEA (Political Committee for National Resistance), also known as the ‘Mountain Government’, with a remarkably broad agenda for social and political reform. The new political subjectivity of women was given an institutional legitimacy with the approval of the first Equal Rights clause, under PEEA. According to Article 5 of the PEEA constitution, ‘All Greeks, men and women, have equal political and civil rights’ (1944). This allowed women to vote at a national level and to stand as candidates for the first time in Greek history. Other PEEA legislation of direct benefit to women was the adoption of demotiki (the demotic language) as the official language in EAM held areas of Greece, in the place of katharevousa, an idiom that was incomprehensible to the peasantry and therefore the vast majority of Greek people. In addition, it included other important milestones such as the introduction of literacy programs and the setting of a gender-neutral minimum wage scale, which stipulated ‘equal pay for equal work’. In May 1944, PEEA supervised the election of 250 members to the Ethniko Symvoulio (National Council) with representatives from regions of both liberated and occupied Greece, many of whom were women. These reforms accompanied wider societal shifts such as the traditional stranglehold of male lawyers and doctors becoming eroded, at least symbolically.
The entry of women into all facets of the resistance movement and into public life, was conceived thus as their ‘political baptism’. This was true even if girls’ and women’s participation mostly conformed to traditional norms. Especially in the early stages, both rural and urban women were initiated and organised into the Resistance primarily through the underground relief organisation, Ethniki Allilegii / EA (National Solidarity). EA was founded in May 1941, setting up branches in all major towns and cities and in every village of Free Greece, as did all the subsidiary organisations, which formed the base of EAM’s structure, the beginning of an emerging EAM state. The establishment of soup kitchens, clothing pools, child recreation centres, nursing and communal washing, and providing shelter for renegade British soldiers were activities that constituted the work of women in EA. The rural EA contingent also had the critical task of providing the material infrastructure for the ELAS fighters, whose bases were scattered throughout rural, mostly mountainous, Greece.
On the one hand, the predominance of women in support services demonstrates that the work of the adartissa (partisan woman) was an extension of women’s duties traditionally carried out in the private sphere. On the other hand, any challenge to the traditional gender order required a delicate balance of old and new and of tradition and innovation, in order to manage often fierce resistance from both within and outside the movement. But these familiar roles occupied by women acquired a new meaning in the radically different context of collective action and purpose, as the vast number of oral testimonies and memoirs of participants have attested.2 The grass-roots challenge that anti-fascist resistance posed to the social contract was and remains a defining feature of the EAM Resistance era. The mobilisation and enfranchisement of women, in particular, was among its most powerful legacies and elicited the most visceral backlash in the civil war that followed.
The emerging context of global Cold War validated fears that EAM–ELAS had always been subservient to the Kommounistiko Komma Elladas (Greek Communist Party), who in turn used the occupation and national liberation as a pretext for seizing power in Greece. The subsequent slide into civil war between left and right (1945-1949) witnessed a rhetorical twist by which Resistance-era goals of social justice and gender equality became treasonous notions by mere association with communism. In conclusion, the stifling of the Resistance project and the subsequent decades of institutionalised repression of the Left and its history, inadvertently linked anti-fascism with social (in) justice, and in so doing embedded the language and spirit of anti-fascism in progressive politics, for posterity.
Featured image: Liberated Athens, November 1944 A gathering of young men and women of EPON (EAM youth wing). Courtesy of the Archive of Contemporary Social History (ASKI), Athens, Greece.
- See Nicos Mouzelis, “Class and Clientelistic Politics: The Case of Greece”, Sociological Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1978). 74; “On the Concept of Populism: Populist and Clientelist Modes of Incorporation in Semipheripheral Polities,” Politics and Society 14, no. 3, 1985, pp. 329-48. ↩︎
- The work of Tasoula Vervenioti and Janet Hart draws extensively on oral testimony. See, for example, Vervenioti, Tasoula. The Woman of Resistance: Women’s Entry into Politics (Athens, Koukkida, 2013 [1994] [in Greek]; Hart, Janet. New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941–1964 (Cornell University Press, 1996). ↩︎
To cite this article:
Margarite Poulos, ‘Anti-fascism in Greece: An eternal politics,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 19 (15 August 2025).
Anti-Fascism and Left Feminist Politics in Greece: An Enduring Legacy © 2025 by Margarite Poulos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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