ATHENS — Main opposition SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance on Tuesday accused the government of focusing on managing impressions at home rather than on a real foreign policy against Turkey.

In an announcement, the party derided the request to the EU to examine a possible full suspension of the EU-Turkey customs union, saying that "this is only an impressions game for domestic purposes instead of a substantive foreign policy against Turkish aggressiveness."

SYRIZA also underlined that the government, instead of insisting on the targeted sanctions unofficially referred to by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, had instead started a discussion on an initative that will have economic repercussions for Greece as well, "while demolishing anything that remains of the positive EU-Turkish agenda for keeping Turkey institutionally and financially close to the EU."

The main opposition party said that the government was "firing shots into the air" instead of actively exercising Greece's sovereign rights, especially to the south and east of Crete, and activating EU mutual defence clauses to support this. It added that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis "must finally understand that national problems cannot be resolved using PR stunts and ads in the pro-government media but demand a national startegy which, unfortunately, he does not have."