Kyriakos Mitsotakis gave his final interview before his speech at the Thessaloniki International Fair on September 6, aiming to send messages to multiple recipients. It was also his first interview after entering the second half of New Democracy’s four-year governance, effectively showing the steps that will follow in the coming period.
Before Friday’s cabinet meeting and the brief summer break that will follow, the prime minister decided to position himself on specific major issues of the day, sending the following messages:
● To Ankara, that if it does not abandon the “blue homeland” concept and alleged gray zones in the Aegean, maritime boundary delimitation cannot proceed – meaning continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone boundaries in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. With this position, Kyriakos Mitsotakis essentially showed that the so-called calm waters policy has its limits, and given Turkey’s behavior, resolution through recourse to The Hague is extremely difficult to unlikely.
● The second message to Tayyip Erdogan concerns his expectation for Turkey’s participation in the European Union’s new major defense program. “As long as it persists with casus belli against Greece, as long as it continues to raise gray zone issues in the Aegean, it will not enter the SAFE program. Greece will not allow it,” Mr. Mitsotakis noted in response to a related question.
● To the prime minister of Libya’s recognized government, Abdel Hamid Dbeibeh, he extended a public invitation “to discuss continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone delimitation with Greece,” thus extending a hand of friendship and cooperation. Mr. Mitsotakis even estimated that “we will soon see technical committees discussing this prospect.” However, the prime minister also called on Libya’s government and General Haftar to choose “whether it wants to align with its immediate neighbor Greece, which offers a gateway to the European Union and very good relations with the rest of the Arab world, or if it wants to be Turkey’s exclusive vehicle, which of course uses Libya as a tool.”
● To all former prime ministers who question the government’s foreign policy, from Kostas Karamanlis to Antonis Samaras and from George Papandreou to Alexis Tsipras, Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s message was clear: “Unlike the policy of other governments that passively watched fait accomplis take root, this government has decided to follow a different and much more active policy,” he said characteristically, then listing what has been accomplished in recent years.
● Regarding former deputy foreign minister Giannis Valinakis specifically, Mr. Mitsotakis was very sharp, following the latter’s positions on Greece’s retreats in national issues, particularly Greek-Turkish relations. “Twitter diplomacy is easy, you know, but especially those who have exercised foreign policy and have nothing concrete to show as a result of their own course, I would suggest being a bit more careful and not suddenly transforming, when they leave office and the difficulty of practicing politics, into critics from the safety and distance of the keyboard,” was Mr. Mitsotakis’s barb toward the deputy foreign minister of Karamanlis’s five-year government.
● To Alexis Tsipras and the return he is preparing to the central political stage: “I cannot, as an active politician who succeeded Mr. Tsipras, allow the history of this country to be falsified,” was Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s message.
● One of the prime minister’s messages was also directed at illegal immigrant traffickers, emphasizing that foreign nationals arriving from North Africa, upon setting foot on Greek soil, are essentially imprisoned and placed in closed facilities. “We want to send a message to traffickers and their clients that arrival in Greece will not equal easy entry into the European Union,” Mr. Mitsotakis stated.
● An indirect message to Nicosia regarding the behind-the-scenes disagreement about expenses for constructing the underwater cable for electricity transmission between Greece and Cyprus. The message concerned cost-sharing for cable construction between the two countries, with the prime minister emphasizing that this issue with Cyprus will ultimately be resolved and is not the major concern.
● Finally, a message to all those who had received irregular or illegal subsidies from OPEKEPE, that this “party” is over. “We will start, however, and I think this is logical, with those who danced in the center of the stage, not those who might have been on the periphery, somewhere in the corner. In other words, those who are being audited today, right now – already a large number of tax numbers. Those who took the big money,” the prime minister stated.
