Photo: Wassilis Aswestopoulos
One cause, many conflicts and crude political explosives
Athens will experience another state of emergency this weekend. For Sunday a rude demonstration is announced in Athens from 14 o’clock. It is ostensibly about the name dispute with the neighboring republic to the north, whose official name, which has prevailed for twenty-six years, is "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM) reads. With more than 1.500 buses, special planes and with tickets for driving sponsored by the shipping company ANEK, numerous Greeks will come to Athens to protest.
The republic, which has been given a prefixed name, is only briefly recognized by the majority of the international community "Macedonia" only in official, governmental use is the provisional name – in English "FYROM" – known. However, in addition to the numerous diplomatic entanglements involved, the name dispute also harbors further political explosives. This, and not the name ie is the subject of the current post.
Because numerous other conflicts are erupting in Greece around the name dispute. The governing coalition itself is in danger of collapsing due to its inconsistent stance. Thus, the Independent Greeks support what they consider to be a patriotic course and refuse to give the neighboring republic any name that is part of "Macedonia" has.
Nea Dimokratia and the name dispute – a problematic relationship
The problem is that most of the politicians of the Independent Greeks come from the ranks of Nea Dimokratia. Under the leadership of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, the coalition had lost power in 1993 because the party of the neighboring republic had changed its name to the "Unity Party" "Macedonia" wanted to concede.
At the time, the incumbent Auben minister, Antonis Samaras, had left the party in protest against Mitsotakis, and was temporarily involved with his own party, Nea Dimokratia "Politiki Anoixi" (political spring) active.
Samaras later rejoined Nea Dimokratia, becoming its party leader and prime minister from 2012 to 2014. At the same time as Samaras’ resurgence in the party hierarchy, the current leader of the Independent Greeks party, Panos Kammenos, said goodbye to Nea Dimokratia in protest. In 1993, he had won his parliamentary seat under Mitsotakis in the early elections of that year. Today, Kammenos stresses that he never agreed to the disputed name component.
Kammenos party will participate in disputed demonstration. It seems to be clear to everyone, except Kammenos, that this actually makes a mockery of the governing coalition. The latter, on the one hand, proclaims that he has full confidence in Tsipras, but, on the other hand, will never agree to the disputed name. He himself will not participate in the demonstration, but will travel abroad. However, he loved the Greeks know that he was going to send his family to the demonstration.
Samaras, on the other hand, succeeded at the last moment in putting his stamp on the party, which had long been undecided in the name dispute. On Thursday, he dined together with party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis and afterwards announced that "on Sunday a rough day for the country is approaching".
Sliding to the right
Mitsotakis, who also does not have much to say in the name dispute because of his father who died in the spring, remained silent. The leader of the Nea Dimokratia party had so far tried to point out errors in the government’s handling of the name dispute. He could not argue concretely against his father’s credo.
So he left the field to the right-wing conservative representatives of his party, his vice-chairman Adonis Georgiadis and Makis Voridis. In recent weeks, Nea Dimokratia has slid further and further to the right over the name dispute.
The party as such had a name with "geographical component Macedonia" – then under Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis. However, because the neighboring republic was simply "Macedonia" the Greek government at the time vetoed the admission of FYROM. In principle, the current Greek government, or rather the faction belonging to Syriza, has taken up where Karamanlis the Younger left off.
Karamanlis the older, Konstantinos Karamanlis – also known as the ethnarch – had already signed documents and initiated publications in the Official Gazette in the fifties, in which the then federal state of Yugoslavia was simply referred to as "Macedonia" was called.
Synaspismos: Communist reformers, once on the side of the name opponents!
Nea Dimokratia, founded by Konstantinos Karamanlis, has to contend with numerous internal contradictions of its own history regarding the name dispute itself. The fact that the name Karamanlis also refers to the former settlement area of the Karamanlis, which is located in today’s Turkey, is only a detail.
However, Syriza itself has the same problems. Because in 1992, when the demonstrations (video) were at a peak because of the name dispute, the party chose a different side than it does today. Leonidas Kyrkos, the icon of the reformed communists, demonstrated loudly along with about a million Greeks in Thessaloniki against naming the neighboring state Macedonia.
The background is manifold. Kyrkos belonged to the communists who broke away from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and founded their own current with the Communist Party of Greece (Inland). From this emerged Syriza.
Eine zwischenzeitliche Wiedervereinigung der KKE und der KKE (Inland) Ende der achtziger Jahre unter dem Dachverband Synaspismos zerbrach und Synaspismos verblieb als Partei ein Sammelbecken fur weitere reformistische Stromungen der Linken.
Kyrko’s presence at the demonstrations was not only for patriotic reasons, but also because the reformers wanted to differentiate themselves from the KKE. The communists of the KKE, then as now, saw the problem not in the name, but in the influence of NATO and the EU, as well as in controversial passages of the treaty of the neighboring state.
Today, Syriza politicians refer to participants in the demonstrations sweepingly and openly as "communists "Right-wing radical", as "uneducated fellow runner" or in private with unprintable characterizations of the. They seem to have forgotten that some of them marched with Kyrkos and Greek flags in their hands in 1992.