Bakoyannis braces for LAOS fireworks

Far right set to challenge foreign policy consensus

Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, seen here in a recent photo, has retained her post in the new Cabinet.

Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis kept her post after the conservatives’ narrow election victory on Sunday but her new term will be complicated by the heated rhetoric of the far-right party Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS).

Bakoyannis’s job, seen by many as a major stepping stone to the premiership, has until now been plain sailing, as opposition parties in the last Parliament were almost unanimous on Cyprus and backed better relations with archrival Turkey.

“The fact that LAOS has entered Parliament, in conjunction with the government’s slim majority, certainly creates a problem,” said Loukas Tsoukalis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

Hopes were raised when Bakoyannis was appointed in 2006 that her conciliatory stance would revive talks on a rapprochement with Turkey, easing efforts to reunite Cyprus, which has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974.

But Turkey’s long drawn-out parliamentary and presidential elections meant there has been little progress on these diplomatic fronts in the past year.

The dispute with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Greece’s northern neighbor, over its name – unresolved for more than 15 years – has quietly dragged on. But LAOS opposes talks with Turkey, rejects a UN-led peace blueprint for Cyprus and refuses any compromise on the name dispute, so Bakoyannis can expect a rougher ride now.

Analysts say LAOS, the first far-right party to enter Parliament since the end of military rule in 1974, will push foreign policy issues higher up the agenda, almost certainly triggering political disputes fanned by what critics say is a nationalist, anti-immigrant stance.

Bakoyannis, born in 1954 and the eldest child of former Prime Minister Costas Mitsotakis, was handpicked by Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis in February 2006 to take over as foreign minister.

“Retaining Ms Bakoyannis as foreign minister is initially a statement of continuation by the prime minister,” said Costas Yfantis, president of the Hellenic Center for European Studies.

“But in Parliament there will be more noise, there will be more extreme voices than before,” Yfantis said.

Culture minister in her father’s 1990-93 government, she was a New Democracy deputy until 2002, when she became the first woman mayor of Athens. (Reuters)