PRESIDENT Tassos Papadopoulos met with the media yesterday to present a staggering “160+1 commitments” for the second half of his decade as President.
It is not clear whether these include the 153+1 commitments that DISY candidate Ioannis Kasoulides last week accused the President of not keeping.
The commitments are “an attempt to better the quality of life of Cypriots”, said the incumbent.
They include, among other things, introducing the General Health Plan, expanding existing health services, bringing schools into the internet age, a ‘neighbourhood watch’ scheme and a doubling of government funding for students abroad.
“Policy has substance when it deals with daily problems,” said Papadopoulos.
European Party vice-Chairman Stratos Panagides thought the opposite, as he came out in defence of Papadopoulos’ building coefficient plan.
Panagides accused the Christofias and Kasoulides camps of “focusing on the practical issues of the plan, in an attempt to diminish its overall worth.”
Meanwhile Green party leader George Perdikis had another anti-Annan plan rant in store for Klirou villagers.
Perdikis spoke of a phoenix-like resurgence of the ‘yes’ camp through the Kasoulides and Christofias camps which “are pleading with the people to repent their April 2004 decision”.
EDEK Chairman Yiannakis Omirou kept the Cyprus problem on the agenda, by blaming the Christofias and Kasoulides camps for attenuating the importance of the July 8 agreement.
“Which other process do they propose for a way out of today’s dead end?” he wondered.
Asked to comment on the findings of recent polls which show a potential dead end for EDEK, namely that the party’s voters are straying from the fold, Omirou said he had “faith that the EDEK voters will be sufficiently mobilised by election Sunday.”
DIKO spokesperson Marios Karoyian pointed out that “when AKEL denounces the government for its stance on the Cyprus problem, it should keep in mind that they were part of this government – and hence of all the efforts made – until very recently.”
Karoyian said that the DISY leadership “has shown consistency in acting as scaremongers, but since their predictions have not materialised, they have lost all pretences to reliability.”
“The people will give President Papadopoulos the message that they will not be bought out or terrorised into voting for him again on February 17,” riposted Kasoulides’ spokesman Loukas Fourlas.
The issue of water shortages was also on the electoral agenda yesterday.
On behalf of the Christofias camp, MP Yiannakis Thoma said: “it is clear that it is because of the upcoming elections” that the government is not restricting the use of the ever-diminishing water supplies.
He added that AKEL’s policy proposal for the resolution of the water problem will once and for all “decouple the island’s reliance on weather conditions”.
Perhaps the people of New Orleans should look to our communist party for inspiration.
DISY spokesman Tasos Mitsopoulos spoke of the government’s “criminal-like delay” over the water troubles of the island, which “is leading to the total destruction of our agricultural economy and driving the people to thirst”.
But it was not an all round Tassos-bash.
Christofias camp spokesman Andros Kyprianou picked on Kasoulides’ Greek nationalism, blasting the DISY candidate for reinstating the ‘Cyprus is Greek’ chant.
“Our position is that people should be proud of their origins,” asserted Kyprianou in an effort to prevent Cypriots with Greek feelings not voting for Christofias, before going to the obvious: “What would the Turkish Cypriots make of this chant? What would the international community think?”
Nationalism debates were not on Kasoulides’ mind, however.
The DISY candidate instead outlined his energy policy for Cyprus.
“We will speedily determine a simple and transparent regulatory framework which will be the launching ground for investment in the field of energy production,” he promised.
“Our goal is a long-term strategy which will guide Cyprus into the new age,” Kasoulides added with apocalyptic overtones.
Goethe’s Faust also made a guest appearance on our election scene, when Kassoulides quoted the Romantic hero in the context of describing Papadopoulos’ self-styled ‘assertive policy’.
“The policy has nothing on which to assert itself: ‘nothing can come from nothing’.”
In fact, it was Shakespeare’s King Lear who first said this in a play, but such detail is often lost in the midst of an election fracas.
