A deputy for ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn (Chryssi Avgi) reportedly faces a high treason charge – a felony that hasn’t been tried in Greek court for decades – after he called for the armed forces to engineer a coup d’etat in the country.
The MP, Konstantinos Barbaroussis, called for a putsch during a particularly contentious debate in Parliament over a recent agreement between Athens and Skopje to resolve the fYRoM “name issue”, a development that generated sharp reactions by the opposition on both sides.
Barbaroussis’ comments apparently exceeded the margins of Golden Dawn, whose deputies and supporters in the past have often reacted in an extremist manner. Soon after his call for a military intervention, the party’s leader expelled him from Golden Dawn’s Parliamentary group.
An indictment was quickly drawn up and conveyed to a relevant magistrate, a judicial official that can order Barbaroussis’ arrest.
One of the side-effects of the inflammatory comments was that public attention momentarily shifted from the actual debate over the draft agreement with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM).
