LAST night’s final televised debate between the two presidential candidates on the critical future of the country degenerated into a row over political text messages.
DISY candidate Ioannis Kasoulides and his rival in tomorrow’s ballot, AKEL’s Demetris Christofias, touched on such issues as the Annan plan, the EU, nepotism, religion and education.
But time and again the debate kept returning to the SMS messages AKEL claims were coming from the Kasoulides campaign office.
The messages, which have been circulating for days, portray AKEL as hard core communists, and the party claims they were being instigated by Kasoulides’ daughter Joanna.
Red-faced and angry, Christofias was the first to raise the issue in the debate, asking Kasoulides whether the SMS strategy was very European.
And he said the House had passed a law in 2004 outlawing such messages.
Kasoulides said he was surprised that his rival had raised the issue during a debate on the future of the country, and said Christofias was aiming below the belt by dragging his family into the controversy. And since when was censorship part of the law? he asked.
Kasoulides said there had also been anti right-wing texts. “But I never made the accusation that these came from his camp,” said Kasoulides. “I think you are hitting below the belt.”
Again and again Christofias came back to the question, digressing from a question about nepotism to wave a photocopy of one offending message which contained a photo of the Soviet army and the question if this was how Cyprus would defend its interests in Europe.
He suggested Kasoulides apologise for his daughter’s behaviour.
“My daughter and son would never send something like this,” said Christofias. “Are we [AKEL] fascists? In Cyprus in the 21st century?”
Kasoulides also launched into the SMS issue during a question on the Annan plan, accusing AKEL of acting like a victim.
“The whole mechanism of AKEL has come down on a 25-year old girl,” said Kasoulides referring to his daughter. “It’s worse than below the belt.”
During discussions on other topics, the two candidates clashed over their visions of Europe. Kasoulides played the European veteran, reminding Christofias of anti-EU statements that had come out of AKEL in recent years, quoting his rival as having described the EU as “an organ of Western capitalism”.
“Go and say that in the EU,” taunted Kasoulides.
Christofias clearly felt insulted that Kasoulides was taking a superior attitude when it came to his EU contacts and said the DISY candidate was not the only one that had inroads in Europe. “The view that Kasoulides is the only one that loves Europe is mistaken,” said an angry Christofias, calling on Kasoulides to stop talking as if he was the only one who knew anything about Europe.
The two candidates also argued over the Church support for Kasoulides, and Christofias took exception to being opposed to religion. Asked what he would say to Archbishop Chrysostomos tomorrow if he won the election, Christofias said: “I will express my sorrow to him [over his backing for Kasoulides].”
Christofias also tried to paint Kasoulides as a nationalist, but the latter countered: “If we don’t believe in our own identity, what shall we say? We are Swedish?”
Grilled about his ‘yes’ in the Annan plan, Kasoulides defended his position by saying that was in the past and had been rejected by the people.
“I wasn’t the one who said ‘no’ so that I could ‘cement a yes’ to the Annan plan a few months down the line,” said Kasoulides pointing at Christofias.
