Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos signed the law to ratify the Prespa agreement, under which Macedonia is renamed into North Macedonia, after which it was published in the Greek Official Gazette the same day it was approved in the Parliament, with a narrow majority of 153 votes (out of 300 in total).

Under the agreement, Greece pledges not to block Macedonia’s application to NATO and later to EU, under the name Republic of North Macedonia. Macedonia already had this type of guarantees from Greece under the 1995 Interim Accord, but Greece violated it in 2008 when it vetoed Macedonia’s NATO membership, and later on multiple counts when it blocked the opening of EU accession talks, and faced no punishment from the International Court of Justice.

Greece did not ratify that treaty, and now it has a far more intrusive agreement that allows it to micro-manage expression in Macedonia and to demand that domestic institutions are also renamed to reflect the new name. Whether it will honor the obligation to allow Macedonia into NATO will be seen in a matter of months, possibly weeks, as NATO will ask it to ratify Macedonia’s accession protocol.