The regulations governing public financing belong to the broader field of regulations that concern the function of political parties and, especially, their incorporation into the normative legal-constitutional realm. In particular, party funding constitutes one of the most significant issues involved in the function of political systems. In Greece, and in the environment of ‘professional politics' that has been organized in recent decades and that weakens modern parties as ‘voluntary unions of citizens', transforming them into a kind of ‘corporation', state financing is essentially the element that preserves parties financially. In other words, it is the institutional guarantor of the dependence of the parties on the state and, moreover, a crucial instrument for the centralized control of the political system. In this study, the regulatory framework of the (private and public) financing in Greece is examined and the effects of the latter on the form and the function of the political parties are noted.