The Greek Current

The foreign ministers of Greece and Cyprus were just in Oman, where EU ministers met with their Gulf counterparts. Needless to say, the planned agenda got thrown out the window with the Hammas terrorist attack against Israel taking center stage. Following meetings in Oman, Greece’s Foreign Minister said he had been in talks with his counterparts from the Gulf and other Arab countries, and announce...

This weekend Hamas - designated as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States, the European Union, the UK, as well as other powers - launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, with its fighters entering communities near the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of residents and taking dozens of hostages. While the attack has spawned fears of a wider Middle East war, it is also putting the spotlight on...

A firefight between Serb paramilitaries and Kosovo police at the end of September marked one of the worst episodes of violence in the country in years, raising questions about efforts to settle the Kosovo issue and whether future flare-ups of violence are on the horizon in the Western Balkans. Dimitar Bechev, a research fellow at Carnegie Europe, where he focuses on Central, Eastern, and Southeast...

Local elections are taking place on Sunday in Greece, and Prime Minister Mitsotakis has been on the road campaigning for New Democracy candidates across the country. This is seen as the first big test for the government after Prime Minister Mitsotakis was overwhelmingly re-elected this summer, and comes after a few months of heavy criticism over its handling of multiple crises - from wildfires to...

Heatwaves around the Mediterranean - from Spain to Greece - have damaged olive harvests, with recent reports indicating that Europe has almost run out of local olive oil supplies. For its part, Greece- a key exporter of high quality extra virgin olive oil to the rest of the world - is expected to produce a third less than last year, and consumers are already experiencing significant price hikes on...

Azerbaijan’s military offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh last month has seen discussions of war yet again echo across Turkey’s media landscape. As in 2020, pundits on Turkish television delighted in the use of Turkish-made weapons by Azerbaijan, whose victory is greeted as yet another triumph of the Turkish defense industry. This has put the spotlight on Turkey’s strong militarist tendencies, whic...

With 2023 seeing a spike in arrivals on Europe’s shores and borders, migration is once again the pressing  issue across the continent. The European Commission’s vice-president, Margaritis Schinas, has urged member states to finalize a crucial deal over migration reform, telling ministers that a unified plan would be a means of fighting back against a rising tide of populism and smuggling networks....

The broad consensus today is that US-Greece relations are at an all time high. As the two countries deepen their ties, and as Greece takes on a more active role in the region as a key player, many are arguing that the “sky is the limit” when it comes to where the relationship could go. This was the focus of a recent policy paper Katerina Sokou wrote for ELIAMEP, titled US-Greece Relations: Capital...

Greece’s big economic success over the last years has been tourism, and, as tourists flock to Greece, so is foreign money. This is also coinciding with an increase in Greek homes going to foreign buyers, and in homeowners choosing to put their homes and apartments on platforms like Airbnb. As a result, average Greek property prices and rent have shot up, and many young Greeks fear that homeownersh...

Earlier this month at the G20 summit the US and the EU backed an ambitious plan to build an economic corridor linking Europe with the Middle East and India via rail and sea. Greece is set to play an important geostrategic role on this corridor, as Greek ports would serve as the gateway into Europe. The announcement at the G20 summit followed a trip that India’s Prime Minister Modi made to Greece i...

In 2021, despite warnings about items from its collections being sold by private persons, the British Museum chose not to view the matter “with much alarm.” This summer it became known that more than 2,000 items were stolen from the British Museum over a long period of time. This undoubtedly raises questions about the safety of countless artifacts, and has some asking whether it will affect the de...

Reports indicate that after a number of delays Greece can expect movement on its request to purchase F-35 fighter jets in the coming weeks, with the Biden administration expected to send a formal notification to Congress. At the same time, October is shaping up to be a crucial month for the issue of the potential sale of F-16s to Turkey, as the US will be watching to see if Turkey’s Parliament, wh...

This Sunday supporters of SYRIZA, Greece’s second largest party, will head to the polls to select a new leader, as Stefanos Kasselakis, the surprise winner in the first round elections, faces Effie Achtsioglou in what’s expected to be a close showdown that will define the future of the party. As the race for who will take the reins of SYRIZA heats up, Greeks have begun to look more closely into St...

Last week the Biden administration imposed sanctions on five Turkish companies and a Turkish national, accusing them of helping Russia evade sanctions and supporting Moscow in its war against Ukraine. US officials have repeatedly pushed Turkey to crack down on Russian circumvention of sanctions, particularly when it comes to the export of chemicals, microchips and other products that can be used i...

On Wednesday Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis held a much anticipated meeting with Turkish President Erdogan on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The two leaders agreed to continue working to deepen the positive climate in Greek-Turkish relations that has been established this year, laid out a roadmap of contacts for the coming months, and discussed issues of common interest such as migr...

As the week kicked off at the UN in New York, Turkish President Erdogan sat with PBS NewsHour for a one on one interview, where he talked about Turkey’s relations with the US, with Greece, the state of human rights in his country, and his ties to Putin’s Russia. Aside from his outbursts at journalist Amna Nawaz over her questions on human rights, Erdogan also raised eyebrows with his statements on...

A new political season has kicked off in Greece this month as voters went to the polls to elect a new leader for Greece’s main opposition party, SYRIZA, on Sunday, while Prime Minister Mitsotakis outlined his government’s priorities at the Thessaloniki International Fair in the wake of the devastating wildfires in August and the deadly floods in Thessaly. Amid these developments, voters are also p...

This week Washington DC turned its attention to Nagorno Karabakh - or Artsakh - once again, with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee holding a hearing on the failure to break Azerbaijan’s genocidal blockade of Artsakh that has left some 120,000 Armenians on the brink of starvation. Senator Menendez, the chairman of the Committee, was emphatic about the urgency of the situation in Artsakh, stati...

For years, the US has had an unshakable, yet unreasonable assumption: that Ankara is a normal ally. Washington has operated from this point of view even in the face of contradictory evidence, and has looked to avoid public disputes while pretending that disagreements are trivial. Instead, as Prof. Henri Barkey argues in Foreign Affairs, the US needs to meet Erdogan’s provocative unpredictability w...

Days after Storm Daniel passed through Greece, Thessaly - Greece’s agricultural heartland - is still under water, with locals describing apocalyptic scenes. With the plain accounting for 25 percent of Greece’s agricultural production, the threat of shortages and price hikes now looms large. On top of that, with the waters still high, there are now warnings that this could turn into a major health...

Mastic - a unique product from the Greek island of Chios - has been at the heart of the island’s economy for centuries, linking it - and Greece - to the rest of the world, particularly the Middle East. Mastic found on Chios is used extensively throughout the Middle East, propelling trade and cultural links between Greece and the Arab world for centuries. As Greece takes steps to play a much more c...

As the US-Greece partnership reaches new heights, it is also touching on all aspects of both societies, and one of the areas where the US and Greece are working together is to advance the rights of persons with disabilities. This was the focus of US Special Adviser Sara Minkara’s latest trip to Thessaloniki. Sara Minkara, the US Special Advisor on International Disability Rights, and Chrysella Lag...

Over the past few years it seems that the island of Imvros, a Turkish island in the Aegean Sea with a historic Greek population, is experiencing what’s been described by some as a small Greek renaissance, as some descendants of the Greeks who were largely displaced in the 1960s have begun trickling back. Elsewhere in Turkey, however, the picture is bleak. Out of a population of some 200,000 Greeks...

Greece was battered this week by Storm Daniel, which has led to the death of multiple people, triggered landslides, road and bridge collapses, and is being described as a “biblical catastrophe”. The heavy rainfall, which comes on the heels of a devastating few weeks of wildfires, has turned many villages in the low-lying area of Karditsa, in the mainland Thessaly plain, into a lake. With rescue ef...

The leaders of Greece, Israel and Cyprus once again put energy cooperation at the heart of discussions earlier this week in Nicosia. The three leaders took it a step further to explore expanding their cooperation, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referring to the possibility of an infrastructure and electrical link between Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Europ...