THERE is still one year to go before the presidential elections but it appears that the two big parties, AKEL and DISY, have already begun campaigning.
DISY’S campaign is more conventional, as its leader Nicos Anastassiades has declared he would be a candidate and is already talking about what he would do if elected. He has given several interviews in the last couple of weeks, in which he attacked President Christofias’ handling of the Cyprus talks and outlined his plan to appoint a negotiator under the authority of the party leaders.
AKEL’s campaign has been rather unorthodox as the party has yet to choose its candidate. Its campaign is exclusively focused on discrediting Anastassiades and questioning his suitability for the presidency. The party and government spokesman have issued a host of announcements accusing the DISY chief of inconsistency and of changing his positions on the national problem in order to improve his election prospects.
Yesterday, the party’s spokesman Giorgos Loucaides called a news conference for the sole purpose of responding to what Anastassiades had said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday. Loucaides said he was guilty of ‘continuous transformations’ and ‘contradictions’ geared at promoting his candidacy. Did he need to call a news conference to say these things, suggesting that he wanted to create an election campaign climate?
AKEL wants to create an election campaign atmosphere because it has decided this is the best way to defend Christofias, who is under attack from all quarters for his handling of the national issue. In fact, its stock response to any criticism by the DISY chief in the last six months is that Anastassiades was motivated by electoral considerations, thus disputing the credibility of what he was saying.
It is a crude ploy which works only on the AKEL faithful, keeping the party supporters united against the DISY bogey-man and deflecting attention away from the failings of a president who, with regard to the talks, has manoeuvred himself into a corner from which he cannot escape.
But why is AKEL attacking only Anastassiades, while ignoring other party leaders whose public onslaughts on Christofias are much more scathing? The party, which supposedly is not interested in the presidential elections, is hoping to forge an election alliance with them and therefore ignores Omirou’s and Garoyian’s attacks on the president.
This is the hypocrisy of AKEl, which has a nerve talking about Anastassiades’ continuous transformations. It conveniently forgets how, for four-and-a-half years of the Papadopoulos presidency, Christofias was applauding and publicly defending the late president’s every decision. But when Christofias decided he would be a presidential candidate, he claimed Papadopoulos had been handling the Cyprus issue wrongly. Was this not a transformation for the sake of the presidency?
