After the 1961 elections, in which the Center Union under the leadership of George Papandreou won 1/3 of the seats in parliament, the party leader denounces the results as a product of fraud and announces a “Merciless Fight” against the ERE and Konstantinos Karamanlis.

Nearly two years later, on June 11, 1963, the Karamanlis government resigned, an act linked to the soured relationship between the prime minister and the crown. Finally, the order to form a government is given to P. Pipinelis. Meanwhile, Konstantinos Karamanlis leaves temporarily for Zurich. According to G. Papandreou, the government of Pipinelis, located in the space of the right, can once again favor the intervention of the state apparatus, so the leader of the Center Union demanded the appointment of a provisional government to hold elections. Applying intense pressure and breaking with the second most powerful man in his faction, Sophocles Venizelos, he achieved his goal: the Pipineli government resigned and an interim government headed by Stylianos Mavromichalis was appointed in its place to lead the country to elections with a strengthened proportional representation November 3, 1963

“Until the second morning, not a single political leader made statements on the results of the elections in anticipation of their final formation. The leader of the ERE, Mr. K. Karamanlis, in a conversation with a journalist on the night of the 11th, said that, as a democratic leader, he will accept the verdict of the people, whatever it may be, “Kathimerini writes. The day after the elections. As a result, out of two “nationalist parties”, the Union of the Center won 42.04% of the vote and 138 seats, and the EPE 39.37% and 132. Although the result did not guarantee autonomy for the winners, it changed the political map of the country, as it returned the Center to power eleven years after the victory Marshal Papagos.

On November 4, Kathimerini wrote in its fifth morning issue: “There is information that the leader of the National Radical Union, Mr. Konstantinos Karamanlis, has decided to withdraw from the political life of the country.” Indeed, a few days before the resignation of the short-lived Papandreou government on December 24, K. Karamanlis leaves Greece, appointing P. Kanellopoulos as his successor.