Resurgent diplomatic activity and press speculation over prospects for a solution to the lingering “name issue” generated the latest end-of-year toxic standoff between the leftist-rightist coalition government and the center-right main opposition.
The “name issue” still prevents a full normalization of relations between Greece and its northern neighboring, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM), although trade, investment and people-to-people ties (visits by citizens of one country visiting the other) are vibrant and growing.
Main opposition New Democracy (ND) party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in fact, said the government’s mandate is at stake if the outspoken defense minister does not back whatever government proposal – if such materializes – over a solution to the “name issue”.
The current DM is Panos Kammenos, whose small rightist-populist Independent Greeks (AN.EL) party props up the coalition government. Without the support of the nine AN.EL MPs in Parliament, the coalition would collapse. Kammenos, a career politician, is well-known for his often inflammatory statements, outbursts and hard-line stance on national issues, although his and his party’s anti-bailout, anti-austerity and anti-EU rhetoric remained only in theory once they joined Alexis Tsipras’ leftist SYRIZA in the “strange bedfellows” coalition.
In an interview published by the Sunday weekly “Vima” over the weekend, Mitsotakis emphasized that there is “no national understanding without, beforehand, a specific and agreed to proposal by the two government partners (SYRIZA and AN.EL) … if Mr Tsipras and Mr. Kammenos cannot agree on a major issue of national importance then they should resign.”
In a later reaction, sources from the Maximos Mansion, the prime minister’s office, called on Mitsotakis to reveal a specific proposal over the “name issue”, while charging that there is more than one position on the issue within ND.
In a later reply, this time on record to the “unofficial” comments by the government side but also to a very high-profile Tweet by the foreign minister, top ND cadre Giorgos Koumoutsakos, who holds the shadow foreign ministry portfolio in the main opposition, Tweeted that “responsibility for the negotiation that has begun is yours. The problem of your internal division is not ours. ND will not solve it for you.”
He was responding to Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, who charged that the opposition party “is unable to propose a solution … (to a problem) that it (ND) left unsolved, because Mitsotakis clashed, without resigning, with internal party opponents.”
Kotzias was referring to far-off 1993 and the current ND leader’s late father, Constantine Mitsotakis, who was prime minister from 1990 to 1993.
Although thoroughly obscure by international and even regional standards, the “name issue” has bedeviled relations between official Athens and the newly formed country since 1991, which emerged from the extreme southern rump of one-time Yugoslavia, sandwiched between Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania.
Successive Greek governments have opposed the stand-alone name “Macedonia” and the constitutional name “Republic of Macedonia” for the land-locked country, insisting on a composite name with a qualifier before the name “Macedonia”. The latter, in fact, is the name of Greece’s largest province, found in the country’s north – and bordering with fYRoM – and the area that mostly closely relates to historical and geographical Macedonia.
