ONE OF the 412 candidates in next week’s parliamentary elections, DISY’s Chris Sofroniou, is hoping to take up the cause for returning Cypriots and graduates if he is elected, he said yesterday.
Sofroniou, who held an news conference yesterday, was born and bred in London and moved to Cyprus with his family at the age of 14. He later moved to the USA to study political science and international relations.
After his studies he went on to direct a number of companies including Global Education, a career counselling office helping Cypriots study in the UK.
“We have a very high percentage of university graduates many of whom I know personally from my line of work,“ he told the Cyprus Mail yesterday. “They return to Cyprus to face unemployment, but these people don’t want unemployment benefits. They need incentives and motivation to create their own business,” Sofroniou said. The current government has only made things worse, he added.
“Instead of taking advantage of the wealth of EU funding for young professionals, they just raise taxes,” he said.
Sofroniou was chosen by DISY as a “meritorious” candidate, meaning that DISY members thought he deserved to run for elections on the strength of his current contributions to society at large.
He was in a way born into politics due to his father Sofronis Sofroniou’s role as senior adviser to President George Vassiliou during his 1988 to 1993 term so following his father footsteps is natural to him, he said.
Sofroniou has been actively involved in bicommunal activities and it is the Cyprus problem that seems to have roped him into running for elections. “We’ve reached a deadlock – that of the final separation of Cyprus,” he said. “All political forces have to come together to solve the Cyprus issue. The Turkish Cypriots are losing their identity and the next generation will have no memory of living together in harmony.”
Coming from occupied Morphou this is an issue Sofroniou cares deeply about, he added.
“The manipulation from the media, the church and nationalist elements during the 2004 Annan proposal for the solution of Cyprus was horrible. If our president at the time wanted to reject the plan he should never have accepted it as a basis for discussion and bring it to the people for a referendum,” Sofroniou said.
Despite the bitterness of lost opportunity, Sofroniou is running with the theme: For a more optimistic future. “You have to believe in the future,” he said. “This country is too small to be separated but it’s big enough to accommodate us all.”
