ABSTRACT
The collapse of authoritarianism in Greece coincided closely with the same process in Portugal and Spain. In Portugal, a coup launched by junior army officers in April 1974 destroyed the dictatorial regime initially established by Salazar in 1932-33, and led in 1976 to the first fully democratic elections that the country had known (democratic in that all adults voted in free and fair conditions). In Spain the death of Franco in November 1975 doomed the dictatorship which he had established in 1939, and was followed like wise by fully democratic elections twelve months later. In all three countries parliamentary democracy stabilised thereafter, being consolidated in the 1980s by their accession to the EEC.
