NEWS

Speaker bans Golden Dawn from Parliament after MP’s comments

Speaker bans Golden Dawn from Parliament after MP’s comments

Parliament Speaker Nikos Voutsis on Friday called an emergency meeting of the House presidents, temporarily banning the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party over comments made by one of its MPs.

Voutsis was reacting to far-right lawmaker Constantinos Barbarousis’s address to the House during a debate on a no-confidence motion tabled by conservative New Democracy on Thursday over the government’s name agreement with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

“I call on the country’s military leadership to respect its oath: to arrest Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras [Defense Minister and coalition partner] Panos Kammenos and President Prokopis Pavlopoulos in order to prevent this treason,” Barbarousis said, prompting the immediate reaction of lawmakers with governing SYRIZA.

Barbarousis’s claims were an “open call for a coup,” with the support of the neo-Nazi party, which is deliberately trying to instigate violent reactions in the coming days, when the deal between Athens and Skopje is expected to be signed, Voutsis said.

As a result, the party has been banned from all sessions relating to the no-confidence motion.

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