King Constantine II of Greece — a failed coup, then a throne abolished

Constantine II was the last king of Greece. He acceded in March 1964 at the age of twenty-three and lost his throne in stages: politically in December 1967, when a botched counter-coup against the military junta drove him into exile; formally in June 1973, when the colonels abolished the monarchy by decree; and finally and legitimately in December 1974, when, after the junta’s collapse, a free referendum confirmed Greece as a republic by roughly 69 percent to 31. He never reigned again and lived most of the rest of his life in exile in London, returning to Greece only in his last years and dying in Athens in 2023.

The Greek monarchy, a foreign-rooted institution imported in the nineteenth century and never fully naturalized in Greek political life, had a long history of instability — kings had been deposed, restored, and exiled repeatedly across the preceding century. Constantine inherited this fragile crown and then, in his first years, helped destabilize it further. His clash with the elected prime minister Georgios Papandreou in 1965, and his role in engineering the fall of that government, triggered a constitutional crisis and mass protests that discredited the throne in the eyes of much of the public and poisoned civil-military politics.

When a clique of army colonels seized power on 21 April 1967, Constantine was outflanked. He swore in the junta’s government, lending it a veneer of legality, and then in December attempted his own counter-coup — poorly planned and poorly supported. It failed within hours, and he fled the country. He remained nominal head of state in exile for five more years until the junta, consolidating its dictatorship, abolished the monarchy outright in 1973 and staged a controlled referendum to ratify the change, which Constantine rejected as illegitimate.

The decisive verdict came only after the dictatorship fell. The Metapolitefsi of 1974 restored democracy, and the new government of Constantine Karamanlis put the question of the monarchy to a genuinely free vote. On 8 December 1974, Greeks chose a republic decisively. Constantine accepted that result, even as he disputed the junta-era abolition, and the institution that had been imported in 1863 was retired by the considered choice of the Greek people.