Independent Greeks spokesman Christos Zois left the party on Dec. 11 in the middle of a feud with party leader Panos Kammenos, who earlier in the day ejected one of his lawmakers, Yiannis Manolis as a Member of Parliament for the political group.
Manolis had accused Kammenos of lying over a document in which the party leader proposed joining a coalition government after elections in May only as long as he was made Defense Minister. He also called Kammenos a “coward” for allegedly walking out on the party’s 20 MPs during a meeting a day earlier.
“If I had any reservations after (Monday’s) meeting of the parliamentary group and administrative committee … this morning, after hearing an interview by the leader of Independent Greeks on radio, I gave up all hope,” said Zois in a statement explaining the reasons for his resignation and accusing Kammenos of creating “chaos.”
Independent Greeks was founded by Kammenos in February and won 7.5 percent of the vote in the June elections, which made it Greece’s fourth largest party. Kammenos has been under siege and struggling to keep his small party together after some of its lawmakers forced him to flee a meeting after he refused to answer their questions over his hardline stance against working with their leftist rivals, SYRIZA, and accused him of “cowardly” behavior.
Kammenos, whose party is opposed to the international bailouts keeping the Greek economy alive because they reject the attached austerity measures, met his 20 Members of Parliament on Dec. 10 but was grilled so hard on his refusal to collaborate with SYRIZA and on the prospects of Greece leaving the Eurozone that he walked out of the room, the newspaper Kathimerini reported.
When Kammenos sought to reconvene his MPs, in an apparent bid to limit damage, the secretary of his parliamentary group, Costas Markopoulos, refused to do so, replacing him with Panayiotis Melas, the paper said. Kammenos subsequently got 16 of his 20 MPs to sign a document supporting the party line, but the rebels are among his small party’s most prominent.
The Athens-Macedonia News Agency (AMNA) reported senior party sources were left “speechless” after Kammenos allegedly walked out of the meeting when deputies starting asking questions about the party’s policies.
One senior MP told AMNA that Kammenos also refused to answer questions about ethics but did not give further details. The party, which gained 7.5 percent of the vote in the June elections, was formed in February and ran on an anti-austerity platform.
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