ND official blasts Kammenos over FYROM name talks comment
New Democracy shadow foreign minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos on Tuesday accused Defense Minister Panos Kammenos of undermining the government's ongoing efforts to negotiate a solution between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) over the latter's name, after the minister said the two sides are unlikely to reach an agreement.
“If this is really the statement, the government has a big problem because the defense minister appears to be undermining the effort of the government, in the midst of the negotiations, and while [Foreign Minister Nikos] Kotzias is in Washington and New York for talks,” he said on the sidelines of an event organized by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Foundation on the outcome of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Sofia.
“It is a big problem the government has before it and must be solved,” he added.
Speaking earlier on Alpha radio, Kammenos, head of the junior partner in Greece’s coalition government said that United Nations-brokered talks will inevitably reach an impasse because Greece’s insistence that FYROM amend its constitution to remove certain clauses seen as expressing irredentist ambitions would never pass through parliament in Skopje.
