EVER SINCE last summer when the comrade Commissar decided to stand for the presidency, we have been hearing about a three-horse race – a view confirmed by the thousands of opinion polls conducted – without ever being told who the three men riding the horses would be.
The race is a bad remake of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and I hope the late Sergio Leone would excuse us for taking such a liberty with his classic spaghetti western, especially as the Bad could eventually end up with the treasure.
We had a little difficulty deciding the casting, as the Ethnarch could as easily have played the role of the Bad as that of the Ugly. But because the Commissar has been too much of a Mother Teresa to play the Bad, he had to take the role of the Ugly, for which he is quite well-suited.
The casting of the Good was pretty straightforward. Kas might not possess any of Clint Eastwood’s coolness or sex appeal, but he could not play the role of the Ugly as convincingly as the Commissar in the event that we decided to make the latter the Good, which in a way he deserved given his self-advertised humanity and boundless love for ordinary working people.
True, the Ethnarch has neither the menace nor the sinister gaze of the majestically evil Lee Van Cleef, but he has the same moustache. And even though he has been known to cry in public like a girl, he can still be pretty bad, mean and ruthless himself – especially when he has had to save the ranch from the scheming Anglo-American gun-slingers and cattle rustlers.
Below is a closer look at the main cast of the longest-running election show we have had the misfortune to watch and I apologise we do not have the technology to accompany it with the Morricone soundtrack.
IL BUONO: Kas spent most of the campaign trying to prove that he is a Ioannis and not a Yiannakis, at pains to shake off his Il Buono image, when it became clear that this was not expanding his support-base. Not always fast on the draw, he realised that being positive and nice was not going to win him anything, as it reinforced the public perception of him as a bit of a passionless and timid hobo without the appetite for a saloon brawl or a shoot-out.
He seemed almost ashamed of his middle-class, Nicosia upbringing which made him a quintessential butter-boy* – well-mannered, decent, civilised, clean-cut looks and very wet – as this would not make him very popular with the ordinary cowboys and peasants who make up most of the electorate. His efforts to mix with plebs in the coffeeshops, to show them he was one of them, failed because he always drank Diet Coke, the ultimate girly drink.
Anyway, he did manage to toughen up in the last few weeks of the campaign, becoming more like his Clint character. He remained Il Buono, but developed a hard edge, throwing a punch or two for his beliefs and showing more aggression when dealing with Il Brutto and his hired guns who were constantly shooting at him and bad-mouthing him in television interviews.
Kas was unable completely to discard his nice guy image in the last days of the campaign when he reverted to type with that appalling TV ad inviting us all to join him and ‘go forward’.
IL BRUTTO: Tassos spent the last week of his campaign struggling to convince everyone that he is not Il Brutto and his attempted transformation to Il Buono was almost successful. Watching a couple of his television appearances in the last week, I started thinking that he may have been miscast as the Bad. He was self-effacing, good-tempered, modest and magnanimous about his enemies; at times, he almost came across as likeable; and likeable Brutto is all wrong.
Of course, three days of pretending that he is no longer the lying, arrogant, vindictive, confrontational, mean-spirited, trigger-happy egomaniac he has been all his life will have convinced only the most na?ve and dumb movie-goers. And of course he stood to lose his support from all the voters who liked him because he is a mean, moody and nasty hobo who loves to organise lynch-mobs and let them loose on his opponents.
At least he drew the line at kissing children and being nice to old-age pensioners to raise his niceness quotient. Speaking of pensioners, he looked like one in the TV ad in which he walks through the palazzo and gazes meaningfully out of the window. Do not know who directed this pretentious Bergmanesque nonsense, but the subliminal message was that this was an old man, a spent force, who had reached the end of the line and was coming to terms with his mortality.
For his TV ad, I would have dressed him in black and put him on a horse that was galloping across the Mesaoria plain, shooting at Turkish soldiers, settlers and tanks which tried to stop him reaching Kyrenia.
IL CATTIVO: The Commissar is the most wronged of our three protagonists, as he could have easily been given the role of Il Buono, after focusing his entire campaign advertising his humanity, virtuousness and love for the poor workers, as well as for his mummy. Being Il Cattivo does not necessarily preclude him from also being Il Buono, although he does have the ideal looks for the role.
In Leone’s film, Il Cattivo is not supposed to be the brightest spark and often ends up committing big blunders because he is over-emotional and a bit of a peasant, routinely allowing his feelings to get the better of him. Telling voters that he only realised a few months ago the harm Il Brutto has been causing our ranch is an advertisement for his not so high IQ. For the previous four and a half year he was applauding every stupid thing Il Brutto did and shooting anyone who dared challenge him. That it took him over four years to realise was proof that what he lacked in the looks department he also lacked in the brains department.
At least he is the only one of the candidates who did not try to transform himself in order to attract more votes. He has always played the Mother Teresa and has always been Il Cattivo. Neither quality will stop him delivering his election promise to save the ranch, once he decides from whom.
PRIVATE opinion polls must be showing our Ethnarch’s support falling, otherwise he would not have had leading DIKO members distributing leaflets at busy traffic lights in Nicosia on Friday. One driver reported seeing Ethnarch Junior giving out leaflets at the Exagono traffic lights, but we have been unable to confirm it.
But when it comes to acts of desperation nothing beats Friday’s decision to promote 142 sergeants who are serving in the National Guard on a contractual basis. The sergeants had been demanding promotion for years and were ignored, but on Friday afternoon they were informed, by phone, according to Politis, that they would all be promoted. The government would formalise these promotions, they were told, on February 26, two days after the second round of the elections. If Tassos failed to get elected, the promotions would not happen.
The Guard does not require another 142 Chief-sergeants, which would mean the existing chief-sergeants (more votes) would have to be promoted to make room for their newly-promoted colleagues and so forth up the hierarchy. As the chain reaction of promotions is set in motion, the National Guard could end up with more generals and brigadiers than the NATO general staff by the time the elections are over.
WITH the campaign in such dire straits that Junior is being forced to distribute leaflets on the streets and the government is offering army promotions in exchange for votes, why is the Ethnarch sitting at home doing nothing?
There is something seriously wrong when in the last week of the campaign before the election, the Ethnarch has only managed to address one big public gathering, 10 days ago. Last weekend he stayed at home, apart from giving a radio and TV interview; he made a speech at SEK trade union federation on Tuesday and met members of his campaign staff on Wednesday. This is not normal for the last week before the elections, when the other candidates are addressing three meetings a day.
Has the Ethnarch not overcome the flu virus he contracted four weeks ago, or is he suffering from a more serious illness that prevents him from making any public appearances? Rumours about the state of his health provoked a member of his campaign staff that nobody had ever heard of, Chrysemili Psiloyeni, to make the following statement:
“These rumours are immoral, unacceptably unethical and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. The president is in good health and the only thing that is deeply sick is the level of political exchange.” Strange how none of the Ethnarch’s leading lieutenants officially quashed the rumours, assigning the job to a nobody in the campaign staff, who, for all we know, operates the photocopying machine.
Why did the campaign staff’s chief liar, Yiorkos, not deny the rumours? Was it because the Ethnarch feared nobody would believe his prot?g?’s denial?
OUR LEADING daily Phil has been the most fervent supporter of the Ethnarch in this election campaign, even though, as the island’s chief practitioner of the arslikhan philosophy, it has also been trying to stay in the good books of the other candidates.
It has done this by using its editorial comment to defend the Ethnarch against all criticism, without ever naming the critics or saying anything bad about them. One of these critics could, after all, be the next president whom Phil would have to support and praise for the next five years.
In private, the paper’s owners have been saying that the election of the Commissar or Kas would be disastrous for Cyprus, but they have never allowed this view to appear in their authoritative organ. This is their personal view and has nothing to do with the fact that the Ethnarchic campaign has given business – advertising and printing of all his election literature – worth in excess of €500,000 to Phil.
LAST WEEK, we mentioned how the chief media cheerleader of the Ethnarch Loukis P – whose Antenna TV probably received as much money as Phil in advertising from Tassos – was using DISY deputy leader Averof Neophytou to help his hero’s re-election. What we did not mention was the meeting that Loukis P had with the DISY Fuhrer, Nice Nik. At the meeting, the media mogul tried to persuade the Fuhrer to take DISY to the Tassos camp in the event that Kas failed to make the second round.
In exchange, Loukis promised to make Nik presidente in 2013. Nik told him to find another mug to take for a ride, which was when Loukis appealed to Averof.
Interestingly, in the 2003 elections, Loukis persuaded the then AG Alecos Markides to stand for the presidency, thus splitting the DISY vote and helping Tassos win.
THE DECREPIT Dr Faustus also joined the election campaign on the side of the Ethnarch by taking out a newspaper ad, which I am certain he did not pay out of his own pocket, to express his support for the great leader. The ad contained the following statement by the five-star, luxury hotel suite freedom fighter: “My history does not allow me to be silent.” As if there is anyone in Cyprus who does not know his history as a windbag.
APART from Faustus, Phil, Loukis P and the Denktator, Turkish Cypriot developers and estate agents have also come out in support of the Etnarch’s re-election, but stopped short of taking out a newspaper advert. Estate agent Guray Haksever expressed the hope that Tassos would win because “neither he nor we want a solution”, adding: “I am confident that after Papadopoulos wins the elections, the north will experience a new boom in the property market.” Another estate agent, Mustafa Genc, said: “With him as president, we do not have any problems.”
CONTEMPLATING today’s elections the other day, I suffered a minor panic attack, at the thought that our venerable Ethnarch could be eliminated and we would never hear about the imminent return of the Annan plan again.
I realised I had become quite emotionally attached to the Schedio Annan in the last seven months as it had become a part of my daily life. I was particularly fond of hearing it being uttered from the lips of Yiorkos Lillikas, whose Paphian speech manner made it sound soothingly soulful.
My only disappointment is that nobody made a song about it so I could play it whenever I was seized by a sense of nostalgia in the coming months and years.
(* as a long-standing member of the Pancyprian Association of Nicosia Butter-Boys I would like to condemn Kas’ cynical decision to renounce his middle-class, social background for electoral gain and remind him that no matter what he does he will remain one of us. It is time we butter-boys stopped feeling ashamed about our upbringing and apologising to the complex-ridden and envious horkatous and plebs of Paphos and Limassol for not being like them. I would also like to make it clear that Diet Coke is not our preferred drink)
AS YOU will be voting today, dear customer, we have decided to finish on a positive note by giving you 3+1 good reasons for voting for the Good the Bad and the Ugly:
THE GOOD: 1) He will save the ranch from the Paphos syndicate 2) He will take us forward 3) he will give a public post to Ouranios Ioannides +1) National Guard service will be reduced to 14 months and conscripts who do not want to serve will be able to employ a foreign worker or asylum seeker to do their service
THE BAD: 1) Greece wins the European Football Championship only under his presidency; 2) Yiorkos Lilickass will stay in politics for at least another five years 3) he will secure the partition we deserve and with the right content +1) everyone who is related to a refugee will be given refugee status and allowed to sell his status in exchange for building coefficient.
THE UGLY: 1) He will save the ranch from the Paphos cattle rustlers and landowners; 2) Yiorkos Iacovou will be appointed foreign minister 3) he will create a central State Authority for Culture +1) pensioners will have enough money to take three holidays abroad each year
