Government backs conservative MP over Lausanne Treaty comment

Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis backed New Democracy lawmaker Angelos Syrigos who was criticized by the main opposition for saying that the Treaty of Lausanne, a 1923 peace accord which, among other things, forged modern Greece and Turkey’s borders, is mostly “outdated.”

“The Treaty of Lausanne constitutes the solid, international legal foundation on which the regulation of all relations in the wider region is based,” the spokesman told Skai television. “Syrigos spoke in his scientific capacity about some individual parts of the text, he made a scientific analysis, emphasizing that our sovereign rights are never in question,” he said, adding however that the comment had a “problematic wording or was expressed in a way that could create problems.”

Marinakis also rejected calls to discipline the lawmaker.

Speaking on the same TV channel the previous day, Syrigos said that the international treaty “is a huge thing. It is a core agreement, it has 14 other agreements, annexes, etc. 97% of all these today have no value…Today we have to move to the next phase and tell the truth. The Treaty of Lausanne is an outdated treaty in relation to demilitarization.”

Syrigos later clarified that he “never spoke about a revision” of the treaty. “I said that it is outdated, because the only thing that interests us from the Treaty of Lausanne today, as I have said from the beginning, is the border limitations,” he said and cited as examples of obsolete elements of the treaty provisions on how Greece would pay its Ottoman debt and how prisoners would be exchanged. “All these things are dead,” he said.

On Wednesday, SYRIZA leader Stefanos Kasselakis said the conservative MP’s comments were “a gift to [Turkish President] Erdogan” who “has been trying for some time to revise the Treaty of Lausanne.”