Greece has been largely quiet on the implementation of the Prespa Treaty front for months, leaving it to Bulgaria to block Macedonia’s EU accession and to demand concessions on historic issues. But yesterday, it showed that it is following closely developments in Macedonia and will make new demands as it wishes.
The latest issue is the Macedonian Football Federation (FFM), which did not change its name to reflect the imposed adjective “North”. Zoran Zaev has been pushing hard to remove FFM director Muamed Sejdini, apparently mainly for financial reasons, but the name is part of their fight.
Macedonia qualified to the European Championship (unlike Greece) and the FFM logo is displayed on the team jerseys – in Cyrillic. The name of the team is not there and the only national symbol is a depiction of the sun from the current Macedonian flag – and even that was achieved after loud protests from the public who objected to the first version of the jerseys.
Greece has now lodged an official protest because of the FFM name. It wants the team to use NMK or some similar abbreviation, the full name “Republic of North Macedonia” but not an abbreviation that stands for Football Federation of Macedonia.
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