Not a single needle point was lost regarding national sovereignty after Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, according to Dora Bakoyannis. Speaking on SKAI TV, she began with verbal sarcasm aimed at the suspicious, emphasizing that all islands remain in their place and there is no sovereignty issue. “Did you count the islands? We still have them all? From what I understand, we didn’t lose any island, we didn’t give away sovereignty, we didn’t lose half the Aegean,” the former Foreign Minister commented wittily. She emphasized, maintaining the same level of verbal enthusiasm, that the distance from “Mitsotakis no” to calling him “precious friend Mitsotakis” is “enormous”. Additionally, speaking as an analyst, she underlined that “for those who know the Turks, the issue of trust is decisive, although of course nothing lasts forever”.
Dora Bakoyannis: All solutions worldwide come through dialogue
When asked about the need for dialogue, Dora Bakoyannis responded with the quite convincing “even warring parties talk to each other,” having previously said that “nowhere in the world is there a solution that hasn’t emerged through dialogue“. She commented that criticism toward Antonis Samaras is not sincere, as she mentioned it “has internal reasons and internal targets,” since she believes “his target is Mitsotakis” and that “it is meaningless”. She noted that she has never heard Antonis Samaras raise the issue of lifting the casus belli.
Furthermore, she emphasized that there are essentially two options regarding Greece-Turkey relations: either to “agree on what our borders are” or to “agree that we will go to international arbitration”. Politically, she estimated that “nothing world-historic will happen” until the next electoral contests in Greece and Turkey, “most likely in 2027,” with the goal until then being “calm” and “consolidation of this climate of trust”.
Finally, she focused more on Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ stance in Ankara rather than the response his statements received. “You have a prime minister who makes no concessions whatsoever and says things for the first time inside Turkey,” yet “the criticism is exhausted in comments like ‘they were giggling’.” “These are not serious,” she concluded.
