The political conflict between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists reflected antagonistic social forces and their mutually exclusive aims for the development of Greek society.

The Venizelist bloc was a social coalition, headed by the entrepreneurial bourgeois class. Among the supporters of economic and social recovery - such as was sought by Goudi's coup and materialized in Venizelos' governments - were landless peasants demanding agricultural reforms, which were achieved by turning peasants into smallholders. A section of the petit bourgeois class also sided with the Venizelist coalition. These were mostly petty merchants, who would benefit from the expansion of trade abroad and the widening of the local market, without being particularly endangered by competition. In addition, the poor lower urban classes sided initially with the Venizelists, in the hope of improving their living conditions, following the innovatorty policy preached by the Liberals.

The anti-Venizelist bloc consisted of another inter-class coalition, and included the state bourgeois class, the tzakia and the householders of the city and the village:

large landowners, rentiers, the traditional pre-capitalist petit bourgeois classes, such as manufacturers, who looked with suspicion at international trade and the competition of foreign products, but also smallholders of southern Greece. These population groups forming an outlook that reacted to the socio-economic and political transformations that were taking place in Greek society. Their conservative tendency was initially of a symbolic character but later found its expression on the political plane in the institution of monarchy. Later, the anti-Venizelist bloc broadened and came to include more labouring and popular elements. This development was related to the perpetuation of military mobilization that largely hit the popular classes, especially after the imposition of the blockade by British and French forces in 1916-17 during the National Schism, the results of which had chiefly affected the poorer parts of the population.