Our View: Christofias’ political skills are sorely lacking

AFTER three days of marathon meetings, President Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat will take a 10-day break from the intensive talks that began on Monday in a climate of negativity and pessimism. After the second day, UN Special Representative, Alexander Downer, said he was “happy with the way the negotiations have been proceeding” and that they were “very open and frank”.
This is a peculiar development, considering that 24 hours before the start of the talks Christofias had a meeting with all the parliamentary party leaders and they unanimously decided to reject the proposals submitted by the Turkish side.
The report about the decision, which appeared in government mouthpiece Haravghi said the proposal would be rejected without being discussed. Yet the seven-page document was not rejected and Christofias also submitted his own written proposals on Tuesday, so that talks could proceed.
This erratic behaviour has become the president’s trademark. He agrees with the party leaders because he is afraid to stand up to them but then completely ignores them because he has no intention of walking out of the talks. There is no strategy or plan of action; he is content to improvise policy, always following the path of least resistance.
The way he reacted to the Turkish proposals was a case in point. The Turkish proposals were conveyed to him on January 4 and he expressed no objections, recognising they were negotiable. When they were leaked to the Turkish press on Thursday and he was faced with the knee-jerk reactions of the Greek Cypriot politicians, he changed tack. He started publicly complaining and called a meeting of the party leaders to discuss the ‘unacceptable proposals’. At the meeting, he agreed that he would not discuss the Turkish proposals and that he would report Talat to the UN and European Commission for having deviated from the agreed basis of the negotiations.
He would not have said anything about the proposals if they were not made public. He would have accepted that their submission was part of the Turkish side’s negotiating tactics. Only a fool would have expected the Turks to submit proposals that Omirou, Garoyian and Syllouris might consider to be acceptable. But Christofias did not have the courage to stand up to his critics, choosing the easy option of siding with them. So then if the critics were right, why did he agree to discuss the unacceptable proposals at his meetings with Talat this week?
These are demonstrations in weak and indecisive leadership. The president swings from one position to the other in order to stay on good terms with everyone, not realising that in the process he is destroying the last shreds of credibility he may have had as a politician.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.