Government sources on Friday quickly revealed that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, the head of a small right-wing party that props up the mostly leftist coalition government, have agreed to “revisit” the ostensibly divisive “Prespa Agreement” in March 2018.
One interpretation of the political development, as relayed to the press by sources from within Tsipras’ office, means that the “strange bedfellows” coalition government will delay submission of the specific bilateral agreement to Parliament for ratification. Another possible scenario is that regardless of whether Kammenos and his six remaining deputies – of some of the six – vote in favor of agreement, they’ll continue to prop up the Tsipras government.
In framing Friday’s meeting at the Maximos Mansion government house of the two coalition partners, the same sources said the pair agreed to over the need to “maintain political stability” and economic momentum the country, among others.
Both Tsipras and Kammenos, not to mention all of the Cabinet members and practically all of their deputies, have emphasized at every turn that the current government’s tenure should be exhausted, which means general elections in the autumn of 2019. With leftist SYRIZA trailing the center-right main opposition party by wide margins in all mainstream opinion polls, and with Kammenos’ Independent Greeks (AN.EL) now appearing as a long-shot to re-enter Parliament (a 3-percent threshold of valid votes in a general election is needed), both coalition partners are loath to spark a no confidence vote.
The Prespa (Prespes) Agreement was signed by the foreign ministers of Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM) last June, with a (successful) referendum and constitutional revision (by a Parliament majority) being the “road map” of ratification in the neighboring country. The tabling of the agreement in Greece’s Parliament and a vote for ratification would then follow.
The agreement would finally resolve the more than quarter-of-a-century fYRoM “name issue”, with the highlight being that the one-time Yugoslav constituent state be recognize, in all instances, as the “Republic of North Macedonia”.
In a related development on Friday from the campaign trail ahead of the Sept. 30 referendum in fYRoM, the country’s prime minister and one of the architects of the Prespa Agreement, Zoran Zaev, employed a more patriotic theme in order to convince voters.
“I share the disatisfaction of our fellow citizens over the ‘north’ (as in North Macedonia); it’s not easy to accept. But there is no ‘Macedonia’ except ours … the northern part of Greece is Greece; the western part of Bulgaria is Bulgaria; this is our ‘Macedonia’ and there will not be any other in the world,” he was quoted as saying by the country’s state-run news agency.
Hours later, the MIA agency revised Zaev’s comment, adding that the latter clarified that “a portion of geographical entity of Macedonia is in Greece; one is in Bulgaria and the northern part is our country.”
Greece’s northern province, the biggest in the country, is called Macedonia, with the Thrace province to the east, Epirus to the west and Thessaly to the south.
