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President Demetris Christofias, resignation, Opinions

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A DEFIANT President Christofias made it very clear in the last week that he had no intention of stepping down. He would see out the 16 months of his term that were left, irrespective of his low approval rating, as was his constitutional right.

This dogged defiance however, seemed incompatible with the self-pitying sentiments he expressed on Thursday, telling reporters that he was “very saddened” by the way he was viewed and that he was a “sensitive” president. He was “saddened” because abroad his actions were appreciated. “It is at home that we cannot find a common language and understanding, it is at home that the president does nothing good,” he complained.

Christofias will not regain public confidence by feeling sorry for himself and making people pity him. This might work for a salesman, but not for a president to whom people look up to, for leadership and strength, especially in difficult times. The last thing we need in a time of recession and grim economic prospects is a president who is obsessing about his popularity and publicly complaining because he is not liked.

What the country needs now, more than at any time, is a strong leader, with a plan for economic recovery and an implementation strategy. Measures might alienate some sections of the population, but it would give the majority of the people a much-needed lift when they feel that there is an action plan for dealing with the many problems facing the economy. It would also deprive opposition parties of ammunition to fire at the president.

In the aftermath of the Mari blast and Polyviou report, the government and the president in particular have become very easy targets for opposition parties and the media, because of the amateurish way they have been handling the matter, thinking that they could change public sentiment with aggressive and arrogant rhetoric. This lack of contrition just antagonised the president’s detractors even more. Against this background the president’s calls for unity could only be taken as a bad joke.

People are fed up of talk, which only serves as a reminder of the president’s weakness and failure to provide real leadership. What they want to see are decisions and action, departments in which Christofias has not excelled during his three-and-a-half years in office. But he could make his last 16 months in office a success and mend his badly tarnished reputation by taking a few radical decisions that would put public finances on a healthy footing and the economy on the road to recovery.

This week’s announcement that the government would issue licences for the operation of casinos indicated that he was willing to abandon his dogmatic positions - two years ago he was insisting there would be no casinos as long as he was the president. At the same time we heard that the state was discussing the possible sale of some of its shareholding in Cyprus Airways to foreign investors and privatising the State Lottery. These were about-turns by a man, who was dogmatically opposed to the sale of public assets to private business, and a practical response to criticism he was a prisoner of his ideological obsessions.

He would need to do much more than this to knock our economy into shape, but even in this respect the government is finally prepared to take tougher measures if the public comments of his finance minister Kikis Kazamias are anything to go by. Speaking about the 2012 budget that he submitted to the House on Thursday, Kazamias admitted more may have to be done to improve public finances and did not rule out a third package of economic measures. He also revealed that he regularly consulted with the Central Bank Governor on economic policy, which was also a break with the past for the government, that until recently was at war with the latter. 

These may be steps dictated by the very weak position Christofias has found himself in since the blast but what matters is that he has put aside some of his dogmatic positions. He could soon be persuaded to privatise power production and spare the taxpayer of investing in a new power station, which would make a lot of sense. He could also agree to the scrapping of CoLA and the complete freezing of wages in the public sector for two years.

Brave decisions to bring the budget deficit under control would boost business confidence and drastically reduce the criticism of the opposition parties and media. By establishing a generally accepted, unity of purpose he may even achieve a degree of the national unity he craves.