He would recount later how he had been ushered around the Aegean Sea to do some tourism "at the expense of the State". The EDA party (United Democratic Left) was created in 1951 to represent a broad front covering the parties on the Left, including the proscribed Communist Party. Iliou was one of the founders. In the elections of 1952 Iliou was one of the deported candidates who were elected. The government was forced to release them, but it immediately annulled their election. Iliou became an MP for EDA and was re-elected in all the general elections from 1956 to 1967. He was its parliamentary leader and later President. In 1965 Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos arranged for the tanks of an army unit on the country's north-eastern frontier to be sabotaged, and announced this as Communist sabotage. This was used as a pretext for the immediate arrest, without any formal process, of a number of soldiers and civilians throughout the country. When this subterfuge was exposed, this was raised in Parliament by the Prime Minister George Papandreou. The speech by Iliou on that occasion was seen as prophetic:  "“ ... How come there is a presumption that someone called Papadopoulos is telling the truth while dozens of free citizens are presumed to be guilty without evidence, that an order by Mr. Papadopoulos is enough for the arrest of ten citizens at home in the middle of the night and their imprisonment in total isolation, subject to the usual beatings and maltreatment, and that eventually it should be established that it was all a lot of hot air? And if tomorrow another order targets not 10 but 500, 1,000, 10,000 citizens, might it be possible that this country once more becomes home to a regime of fear, based on another arbitrary and malicious act by some Mr Papadopoulos?”" A cartoon by Bost in Avghi on 5 April 1964 shows Iliou and George Papandreou in a debate - this was turned into a painting which itself became a political prisoner later (see Bost for details). Less than two years later, in April 1967, a military junta, led by Papadopoulos, seized power. Iliou was arrested again and after detention in the Hippodrome, where he was badly beaten, transferred once more to the revived concentration camp on Gioura. His health suffered and he was transferred under solitary confinement to the hospital of the Averof prison in Athens. In 1971 he was released, but had to report regularly to the nearest police station.