ATHENS – After ejecting firebrand lawmaker Pavlos Polakis – who had supported him taking over the party – major opposition SYRIZA leader Stefanos Kasselakis assailed Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for being too soft on Turkey.

A former deputy health minister, Polakis was removed by party leader Stefanos Kasselakis for insulting an aide to Health Minister Antonis Georgiadis, which saw SYRIZA lawmaker Athina Linou apologize to her and condemn her colleague.

Polakis said the aide, a lawyer, was acting disrespectfully during a session of the Committee on Social Affairs and went after her in his usual belligerent style that had rarely seen him reined in by the party.

It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Controversial MP and ex-minister Pavlos Polakis, notorious for his attacks on friend and foe alike, has behaved much worse than he did Thursday during a session of the Parliamentary Committee on Social Affairs. But what he did was enough to make SYRIZA leader Stefanos Kasselakis exclude him from the main opposition party’s parliamentary group, shortly before it met to discuss group issues that wouldn’t include him.

“Don’t make faces, madam. Yes, I’m talking to you, you are wearing a permanent, I wouldn’t say smile, but a dismissive twisting of the mouth. Don’t do that. You’ve done it before and it gets on my nerves,” Polakis said.

That led Linou to jump in and say she was sorry for what Polakis had said. “I want to personally apologize to the colleague for the sort of violence she was subjected to and I think we should not allow such behavior,” Linou said.

Alerted about what happened, Kasselakis looked at a video and then decided to oust Polakis, one of the few SYRIZA veterans who stood by him when he was seeking to be the party leader in 2023.

Parliament Speaker Kostas Tasoulas from the ruling New Democracy also chided Polakis for “disgusting” behavior and announced in the plenary session that he would dock him half a month’s salary.

A defiant Polakis said Linou should have minded her own business and tried to stay in the parliamentary group but group leader Sokratis Famellos – who speaks for SYRIZA in the body because Kasselakis isn’t a lawmaker – barred him.

The brouhaha threatened to overshadow Kasselakis’ attempts to portray Mitsotakis as going too easy on Turkey during a detente that has nevertheless seen Turkey contesting rights to the seas, the primary issue between them.

“Despite the government commitment to ‘peaceful times’, we see that Greek-Turkish relations are at a new period of escalation,” he said, charging what he called “Turkey’s attempt to interfere in Greece’s domestic issues, challenge Greek sovereign rights at Kassos by dispatching warships, and challenging anew the status of the Muslim Minority in Thrace,” said Kasselakis.

He said that SYRIZA “demands from the government that it finally present a cohesive national strategy for Greek-Turkish relations” to face “the revisionist neo-Ottoman Turkish narrative of the ‘Blue Homeland’ and Türkiye’s commitment to dialog with Greece on the basis of international law.”