PRESIDENTIAL candidates and their spin-doctors upped the ante yesterday in the wake of the latest opinion polls and amid reports that the UN’s Plan 3 was on the cards.
AMER’s poll published over the weekend gave presidential hopeful Tassos Papadopoulos 51.9 per cent of the votes, enough to win the elections from the first round. Incumbent president Glafcos Clerides trailed with 33.5 per cent, and Attorney-general Alecos Markides was third with 9.5 per cent.
The results sparked a row over the validity of opinion polls, which have been in constant supply over the past few weeks. Markides spoke of election-campaign “trickery”, insisting that his own research proved beyond a shadow of a doubt he would progress to round two. His spokesperson Prodromos Prodromou issued a written statement yesterday denouncing the “unacceptable practices and professional ethics” by certain newspapers publishing polls. “Clearly,” Prodromou claimed, “this is aimed at damaging our candidacy because our opponents fear the momentum it is gathering”.
“They are turning polls into trash,” went on Prodromou, who was particularly critical of phone surveys, which, he said, lacked any scientific methodology.
“Opinion polls are a highly useful tool in gauging the public’s preferences,” insisted an announcement by opposition DIKO. The party’s election spokesman Marios Karoyian said that “some quarters are panicking once they have realised that Papadopoulos’ popularity is rising and may even prove enough to win the elections from the first round.”
A middle-of-the-road approach was adopted by Yiannakis Omirou, chairman of socialist KISOS. Although upbeat that the Papadopoulos alliance would be victorious, Omirou said that scientific studies have shown polls have little to no effect on the public. “So if in fact opinion polls are being ‘engineered’ — as some people protest — then it’s probably all in vain anyway.”
Meanwhile an entirely different picture was painted in a survey published by Alithia newspaper, affiliated to the ruling DISY party that is backing the Clerides candidacy. In this case, the incumbent president was just two percentage points behind Papadopoulos.
For his part, New Horizons chairman Nikos Koutsou discredited poll-taking altogether, saying surveys served to create false impressions.
On the political level, counter-accusations of inability to handle the Cyprus problem intensified yesterday. The opposition alliance said the government was deliberately cultivating an alarmist climate in a bid to “scare people” into voting for Clerides, who was portrayed as a sort of Messiah by ruling DISY. The coalition camp also fired at Markides, saying he had shifted his stance on the Cyprus issue since running for the office.
DISY boss Nicos Anastassiades countered by labelling Papadopoulos a “rejectionist” who would “bury any settlement plan”.
Ten candidates are running for the top office — four mainstream political candidates, and six fringe independents.
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.
