THE GOVERNMENT’S efforts to cut state spending turned into farce some time ago, but the issue is that it does not look like ending. We witnessed the latest episode on Wednesday – the day an all-party meeting was to discuss money-saving proposals with finance minister Charilaos Stavrakis. There had been another such meeting, several months ago, at which Stavrakis asked the parties to come back with proposals with a few weeks; they did not.
Wednesday’s meeting took place without representatives from EUROKO and DISY, the latter issuing a statement saying it refused to give its endorsement to the government’s “creative accounting and public relations approach.” Representatives of EDEK, which decided at the last minute to attend, and of the Greens walked out immediately after Stavrakis had briefed the meeting about the government’s stability programme, claiming they needed to study the proposals.
This was a perfectly legitimate point. The meeting had been hastily-called and the government did not give out the proposals of the stability programme, which had already been decided and sent to the European Commission. So what exactly was to be discussed at the meeting? DISY appears to have been correct in saying that all the government wanted was the endorsement of its proposals by the rest of the political parties.
But why should the parties have given their approval and taken responsibility for proposals they did not have a say in formulating and did not necessarily agree with? If DISY or EDEK objected to some of the proposals, would the government have scrapped them? Of course not, because it had already submitted these to Brussels. Would it have written to the Commission telling it to ignore its original proposals because some of the parties were opposed to them?
The biggest problem, as we all know, is the growing public deficit and for this to be controlled the public sector payroll needs to be reduced. A united political front would have been much effective in dealing with Pasydy’s objections to any cutbacks, but President Christofias has decided to handle negotiations with the militant union personally. Yet he would be in a much stronger position and have a much better chance of success, if the cut-backs in the public sector were unanimously decided with all the political parties.
But he refused to take this option, thus guaranteeing that his negotiations with Pasydy would be reduced to yet another episode in the ongoing farce being served up by his government as an economic policy. If he wants the backing of all the parties, he should also give them a say in the formulation of the proposals and not just use them to rubber-stamp his decisions.
