PRESIDENT Papadopoulos may have won over public sympathy with his emotionally-charged address to the people on Wednesday night, but the methods he used for achieving this objective did not contribute to the promotion of calm and rational debate ahead of the April 24 referendum. On the contrary his speech, marked by a plethora of dogmatic positions, was deeply divisive and confrontational, setting the stage for bitter and acrimonious exchanges with the parties or politicians who might be supporting a ‘yes’ in the referendum.
Yet he made all the right noises at the start of the speech, calling on “everyone to show respect for (the views of) others” and to avoid “fanaticism”. He added that “the safeguarding of our unity is the highest debt we owe our country”. Then he proceeded to raise the ante to such a level that disunity and fanaticism are all but guaranteed in the days leading up to the referendum, especially if any of the bigger parties come out in favour of the plan.
When the president allows his emotions to get the better of him, and is unable to conceal his hostility while reading from a prepared text what kind of example is he setting for people to follow at a time when tension and acrimony is inevitable? The message he is sending out is that it is perfectly acceptable for people to behave in a hot-headed and confrontational way. He did not seem too interested in encouraging the constructive and rational debate which features in true democracies. If there is unrest and fighting before the vote, he will bear a large share of the responsibility.
Debate, access to information and exchange of ideas about the plan were never priorities of his government. Ever since he agreed to the UN-proposed procedure in New York, his party’s deputies and presidential aides have been working round the clock to create a totally negative, anti-solution climate and were very successful. Most of the things they had been saying in the past two months were repeated by the president in his address on Wednesday night, suggesting that the creation of the negative climate was part of an orchestrated palace campaign to impose the ‘no’vote on the people before negotiations had even been completed.
Then again, Papadopoulos said at the start of his address that he would make “no attempt to impose my choice and wishes” on the people. He would confine himself to offering “guidance”. Yet at the end of the address, which was an unrelenting polemic against the plan and clear attempt by the president to impose his views, rather than anything resembling “guidance”, he called on the people, to “say a strong no”. It seems that saying one thing and meaning something completely different has become part of the president’s political style. As he said on Wednesday, “I have no intention of demonising” the Annan plan, but then spent the rest of his speech doing exactly that.
We hope that when he said he would “safeguard our unity”, he did not mean something completely different, as the tone of his speech suggested.
