The Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Nikos Dendias, and National Defence Nikos Panagiotopoulos, accompanied by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Miltiadis Varvitsiotis will visit Cairo today, Tuesday, November 22, where they will meet with their counterparts. The visit takes place two days after the Erdoğan-el-Sisi handshake, which was seen by Turkey as an opportunity to “unfreeze” relations between the two countries.

As part of the visit, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs will attend the signing ceremony of the “Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue Sectors”, by the Minister of National Defence and his Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Zaki.

As far as the Foreign Minister’s schedule is concerned, he will have a private meeting with his Egyptian counterpart, while extended talks will be held between the delegations of the two Foreign Ministers.

After the end of the extended talks, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, will sign with the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Arab Republic of Egypt for European Affairs, Ihab Nasr, an agreement on the Employment of Seasonal Workers in the Agricultural Sector. The two foreign ministers will make joint statements to the press at around 17:00.

The above meetings are part of the strategic bilateral relations between Greece and Egypt and the regular contact between the highest officials of the two countries.

“For Greece, the relationship with Egypt is a matter of strategic survival”, a leading government source points out to “THEMA” regarding the cooperation that is developing between Athens and Cairo in a number of sectors, from the energy field to defence and economy.

The Minister of National Defense may sign a series of defence cooperation agreements with his Egyptian counterpart. In recent years, Greece and Egypt have intensified their military cooperation with exercises, mutual personnel visits, mutual briefings, and the exchange of sensitive intelligence.

The agreements to be formalised between Athens and Cairo concern search and rescue in the Eastern Mediterranean region and are seen by some as a step before the signing of a memorandum of mutual military assistance, such as the ones Greece has agreed with France and the United Arab Emirates Emirate. Also of critical importance is the agreement on the controlled migration of land workers from Egypt in order to fill the gaps that exist in a number of agricultural sectors in Greece.

5,000 land workers from Egypt to Greece

Following the initiative of the deputy foreign minister who made the relevant recommendation to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in June, the Egyptians agreed to allocate 5,000 land workers to Greece for a certain period of time.

This is the first controlled immigration agreement signed with a third country, while the negotiations that were completed in record time provide for the extension of the duration of the agreement and the increase of the number of land workers in the next phase if the needs of the agricultural work in Greece require it.

At the diplomatic level, Greek-Egyptian relations are characterised as the best they have ever been. The 2020 agreement on the partial delimitation of an Exclusive Economic Zone between Greece and Egypt, which was worked out and signed by the Greek Foreign Minister and his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Soukry, is the beacon for the expansion of cooperation.

Just recently the Greek prime minister and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi agreed on the transfer of electricity from Egypt to Greece and the rest of the EU. through an undersea pipeline.