The President of the House two weeks ago convened a meeting of political leaders in the presence of the Minister of Interior to discuss the implementation of the Local Government Reform.
The meeting was canceled due to the obligations of Minister Constantinos Ioannou and was scheduled for today.
The President of the Republic hastily convened a meeting of political leaders on Monday for Tuesday morning to discuss the reform of Local Government and the potential problems that may arise.
Annita Demetriou cited impediments and did not attend the Presidential meeting. Nikos Christodoulides simply stated on Monday night that there was no issue because Mrs. Demetriou had other obligations and therefore sent a representative.
This was also the official excuse given by DISY for the absence of the party president from the meeting.
What happened? There is the issue of reform and the problems that the Minister of Interior claims will arise. Responsibilities towards the parties and the Parliament for the model of Local Government that has been voted on and for the problems that may arise are clearly laid out by the government.
Annita Demetriou, as President of the House, convenes a meeting with the Minister and the party leaders to address the issue. Nikos Christodoulides rushes to catch up with the meeting to credit the government and himself with the initiative. The president of DISY feigns a busy schedule and does not attend the Presidential meeting to express her dissatisfaction with the President’s move.
Otherwise, there is no competition between them, and none of them is thinking about 2028… The concern of the President was to catch up with the meeting of the President of the House, and the latter, instead of confronting him with the government’s incompetence in working on the implementation of the reform and exposing its communication tricks, made excuses and did not go to the Presidential meeting at all…
However, beyond the communication theatrics, there is substance to the whole story in the theater of Cypriot political reality. The reform of Local Government, along with GHS, is the biggest reform passed in this place since the proclamation of the Republic of Cyprus.
In less than six months, this huge change must be implemented, and the government has been whining all this time about the problems that will arise due to the model of Local Government that has been voted on. The reality is that the parties in Parliament (basically forces aligned with the ChristodoulidEs government) cooked up big schemes, cut and sewed, and finally voted on a reform tailored largely to their own measures.
But that’s done and over with, and the important thing is that there is now something that needs to be implemented and work.
What has happened since the reform was passed by the Parliament until today? Almost nothing. This is not an arbitrary observation, but the facts themselves say so.
It is characteristic of what was said yesterday morning on the morning schedule of the Third Program of RIK by Charalambos Aristotelous Katalakis, Advisor on Local and Regional Government based in Berlin, who was actually invited in 2019 and presented a study on the issue of reform in Cyprus.
“It makes no sense to discuss the decisions of the Parliament,” he said, noting that he had told everyone that the hard work begins after the bill is passed. “There has been a very slow and untargeted preparation for how the implementation will proceed,” he said, explaining that money should be given to the new Municipalities for the preparation of the implementation of the reform.
Because, as he said, it makes no sense to talk about economies of scale without having a study on how these services will be provided in larger geographical areas.
“The discussion has now been exhausted on the number of Municipalities,” he said. “With the passage of the bill, the system was abandoned,” he said, stressing that the Ministry of Interior should have a more active role in the implementation of the reform. He said many other interesting things, but who listens anyway.
