The Macedonian Issue: Accounting for Populist Arrangements, Left-Libertarian Party Factionalism and the Extreme Right Since 1992 in Greece

With the Prespes agreement and a new name, Republic of North Macedonia, for the country neighbouring Greece, we should have had a closure for a saga that started in 1992 with the disintegration of Yugoslavia to its constituent federal states. The Macedonian issue empowered certain interests and created an “industry” in both countries that was operating through the maintenance of extreme discourses that were attached to that. In Greece a polarity developed between “patriots” and “traitors” and left party-political formations, broadly speaking, occupied the latter pole in the discursive devices operationalised by the “patriotic” pole. This paper develops a diachronic of the conflict between the two poles as that was manifested in left political parties (the left-libertarian political family) in Greece that culminates to the advent of Syriza to government in coalition with the extreme right, Independent Greeks (ANEL), a party on the “patriotic” pole - an alliance formed by expediency and tactically and skilfully by passed and abandoned with the ratification of the Prespes agreement by the Syriza government. The opposition on the right is still maintaining the “patriotic” front for its own electoral exigencies in Greece that are likely to be surpassed in the near through its interaction with its EU counterparts.