FORMER Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides has come back to haunt the man whose persistent corruption charges forced him out of office two years ago: DISY deputy Christos Pourgourides.
Much to Pourgourides’ alarm, governing DISY appears to be seriously considering allying itself with Michaelides’ fledgling ADIK party for the May parliamentary elections. Pourgourides, a popular Limassol deputy, yesterday threatened to resign if the proposed DISY-ADIK co-operation went ahead.
Two years ago, in his capacity as chairman of the House Watchdog Committee, Pourgourides led a months-long campaign to nail then Interior Minister Michaelides for alleged abuse of power. Michaelides, though vehemently denying the charges, was eventually forced to resign.
Pourgourides yesterday insisted his objections to a DISY-ADIK alliance had nothing to do with Michaelides and everything to do with an abhorrence of “political expediency”.
“The country’s political life suffers from the fact that there are frequent attempts for alliances of convenience that are not based on common political positions,” the DISY deputy stated. He said ADIK and DISY did not belong to the same political stable, a fact illustrated, he said, by ADIK’s consistent criticism of the government’s handling of the Cyprus problem. Michaelides’ party is not in parliament and has not clearly aligned itself with the government or the opposition.
Pourgourides said he would “speak out” if the DISY-ADIK alliance was forged and added that abandoning the party was one of his options if things went ahead.
Right wing DISY has had stranger political bedfellows than ADIK in the past, having allied itself with centre-right DIKO for the 1993 presidential elections and with socialist EDEK for the 1998 elections. The party was also in power when Michaelides was re-appointed Minister in 1998. But Pourgourides pointed out that he had openly opposed all these alliances too, and Michaelides’ appointment in particular.
Michaelides abandoned DIKO in the run-up to the 1998 elections when it became clear DIKO would not be continuing the alliance with DISY which got Glafcos Clerides elected in 1993. His defection from DIKO paved the way for him to be re-appointed to the Interior Ministry post he held between 1993 and 1998 under the DISY-DIKO administration.
Michaelides yesterday insisted DISY and ADIK had common political common ground to spare. The ex-Minister suggested Pourgourides’ objections were based purely on personal animosity.
“I do not want to comment on the position of the deputy in question, it is up to the public to judge, and I think it already has judged, whether the attacks are personal,” Michaelides said.
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.
