Ahmet Davutoğlu

And Turkey tried to support some forces in the Middle East.

And what happened there was that this policy was formulated by Ahmet Davutoglu, the former Turkish foreign and prime minister, who then went in opposition against Erdogan later on after they broke away with each other.

And after this policy was established, Turkey turned in a position that Ahmet Doğutoglu formulated as an honorable loneliness in the Middle East.

But Erdoğan, after going apart with Ahmet Doğutoglu… He went into a realistic foreign policy approach that has been formulated largely by Hakan Fidan, the current Turkish foreign minister and the Turkish intelligence chief at that time.

So this combination, uh, has allowed us to dramatically increase social expenditure without increasing the budget deficits.

And this was at the time when, when you were prime minister.

You mentioned colonialism.

What did that time mean for you, being able to be prime minister at a time when you were able to see the independence of so many countries that were once colonies?

It was a, a strange form of decolonization because the decolonization was done, uh, because of a revolution that was made by the army, because the army, uh, no longer accepted to go on doing a colonial war without a political solution.

And so this created a special relationship between the Portuguese army and the liberation movements that were fighting each other, and all of a sudden saw themselves on the same side, the side that wanted democracy in Portugal and independence for the colonies.

I have a passport of Timor-Leste, and I'm very happy with that because if there is something that I-- that was one of the main objectives, if not the main objective of the foreign policy of Portugal when I was, uh, in government, was to reach the self-determination of Timor-Leste, and I, I believe we played an important role to support the Timorese people in that, uh, uh, almost unbelievable change.

Uh, 10 years before, if you would ask people if there was any chance of Timor-Leste becoming independent, everybody would say, "No, there is no chance." But together with Timorese, we did it.