The new leadership of North Macedonia must change its position and use in all cases only the constitutional name of its country. Greece has yet to ratify the three memoranda to the Prespa Agreement with North Macedonia on its state name. This was announced by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in an interview with the TV channel ERT.
The Prime Minister noted that the President of North Macedonia Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova and the Secretary General of the party that won the elections “Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization– Democratic Party of Macedonian National Unity“ (VMRO-DPMNE) Christian Mickoski uses the old name of the country in his statements – Macedonia, which, according to the Prespa Agreement with Greece, the country changed in 2019 to North Macedonia.
Missotakis noted that the Prespa Agreement is based on the concept of a single name, according to which the name North Macedonia should be used in all cases, both abroad and at home. "We will wait for the official position of the government of North Macedonia, but the first statements of its representatives are extremely negative," stressed Mitsotakis. He warned that “otherwise there will undoubtedly be problems not only in Greece's relations with North Macedonia, but also in Europe's relations with North Macedonia”.
Missotakis was asked if he intended to terminate the agreement with North Macedonia given the fact that his New Democracy party was against the agreement when it was in opposition until 2019. “What we will make sure is that "We will not submit for ratification the three memorandums resulting from the agreement [from Prespa], and now our position to postpone this ratification is fully justified, because we have already seen long ago what is happening in North Macedonia," replied the prime minister. “We listened to this nationalist madness of the VMRO, we knew that the VMRO would win the elections and we wanted to keep real weapons for negotiations in case things didn't go as some would expect,” said the Prime Minister.< /p>
„The second thing we will do: we will make it absolutely clear that no progress in this long progress of Skopje towards Europe can be made without full compliance with the Prespa agreement on the name issue On the side. ”, Mitsotakis added.
The government of the ruling New Democracy party, which came to power in 2019, has not started ratifying the three memorandums since then, believing that this delay could be a real tool to pressure Skopje to comply with all the provisions of the Prespa agreement. These are memoranda on “Establishing a Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation”, “Accelerating the process of accession of North Macedonia to the European Union” and “Patrolling of North Macedonian airspace by Greek military aircraft”. At the same time, the main opposition party in Greece, SYRIZA - PA, recently presented three memorandums of ratification to the parliament as its draft law.
On May 12, during her inauguration, North Macedonian President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova referred to her country simply as Macedonia, prompting a backlash from the Greek Foreign Ministry. In Greece, the use of such a name by a neighboring country is considered, in particular, as a claim to the northern Greek regions - Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Central Macedonia and Western Macedonia, as well as an illegal appropriation of the history of Greek Ancient Macedonia.
On June 17, 2018, the foreign ministers of Macedonia and Greece signed the Prespa Agreement on the new official name of the former Yugoslav republic - the Republic of North Macedonia - on the shores of Lake Prespa, along which the border between the two countries runs. The ratification by both sides of this document marks the end in 2019 of the 27-year conflict between Athens and Skopje, during which Greece blocked Macedonia's accession to NATO and the EU. North Macedonia became the 30th member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on March 27, 2020.
The Prespa Agreement specifically provides for the renaming of state facilities in North Macedonia that are named after historical figures from Ancient Macedonia. Athens and Skopje also held negotiations within the framework of a joint commission on the issues of correct reflection of the history of both countries in textbooks and curricula.