EU Commissioner Avramopoulos: Prespes Agreement is 'Problematic'
"The Prespes Agreement is not balanced, and therefore it is problematic," EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos said on Wednesday, speaking of the Greece-FYROM agreement currently being debated in the Greek parliament. The commissioner added, "The geographic qualifier all governments agreed on is one thing, but the historic qualifier attempted through the Agreement is another." Avramopoulos said that ethnicity and language constitute national identity, and this opens the way to their being used in irredentist national politics. "The government would have acted differently if, instead of ignoring and then preempting the political parties, it had sought national consensus before moving ahead with the Agreement," Avramopoulos noted.