THERE used to be a time when current AKEL MP Irene Charalambidou was everywhere.
She became famous as the host of ‘Efharisto Savvatovrado’, a hugely popular CyBC Saturday light entertainment show in the late 1980s and 90s, before reinventing herself as a controversial political talk show host who put politicians on the spot and discussed still sensitive subjects such as homosexuality.
She was used to the limelight.
So when she announced she was standing in this year’s parliamentary elections, most expected the new MP to gravitate with ease towards the news cameras and radio mikes at every opportunity. After all, most of our politicians do.
Yet, since she gained a seat in parliament in May, and despite sitting on three quite high profile House committees – health, the watchdog and institutions – Charalambidou has been remarkably quiet.
When asked why, her answer suggests she’s in observation mode, taking in her surroundings rather than jumping at the first opportunity for publicity.
“I’m still in a new space and I’m observing its resistances, tolerances and extremities,” she says.
She agrees that her perceived new media shyness also comes from the fact that she’s an AKEL MP, a party that operates on the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“We mustn’t forget that I was admitted in a group and I operate based on the needs of this group,” she says. “My aim is not to be at the foreground but to serve my party in the way that my party itself determines.
“In AKEL, individuality is annihilated, collectiveness prevails: it is a people-centred party.”
It’s an intriguing answer. How can you be a TV personality – where a lot hangs on the image you project and making a personal connection with people – and then decide to join a party which downplays individuality?
For Charalambidou, there is no contradiction: both demand of you to be dignified and serve your people with honesty, she says.
She admits she does have ambitions however.
“Just like I tried to shed some light on the ‘ghosts’ of Cypriot history [in my TV show], I would also like to do the same for the ghosts of big social problems: nationalism, family violence, the Church, the vested interests of finance.”
Very noble goals indeed, which might explain something of the way she tightly controls her image – it will take a while to tackle all these ghosts and perhaps biding her time to see how her party might need her is the best way to do this.
But her background as a journalist gives her an edge. Over the years, she has become well acquainted with “political figures and their interventions in politics – most politicians were guests in my shows”.
“I know how they are expected to behave, on what level they will make a move and in what way they will develop arguments. They are fairly predictable to me.”
Sexism in what is still a very male-dominated profession she seems to take in her stride, though she says legislators need to catch up with a changing society.
But she admits to still feeling very bitter about an incident earlier this year when she felt badly let down by women whom she thought would support her.
She was referring to a ferocious attack on her by DIKO’s Nicolas Papadopoulos who accused her of drawing a CyBC wage without actually working.
In the end, she was forced to come out and admit she was suffering from cancer.
“When a politician … [forced] me to make public personal circumstances and expose myself as a woman and a mother during a hard time in my life, I did not have the support you’d expect from women who have had similar experiences and act on a group level,” she says.
“(Those women) left me to deal with this alone and I wouldn’t want to think that the reason is that in my face they saw an AKEL MP candidate and not a woman facing the biggest fear of any woman.”
Perhaps that’s why she earlier says that “a woman can achieve anything as long as she is willing to pay the price.”
The price might be a blurring of the personal and the public and the forced leap of faiths: from high-profile TV personality to a less forthcoming politician; from a woman fighting cancer to a politician accounting for her paycheques.
But Charalambidou’s political career has just started.
She will have plenty of time to walk a tightrope.
