The answer was clear before EU Commissioner Várhelyi’s plane touched down in Cyprus on Friday. The EU protocols on foot-and-mouth disease are unambiguous. There was no alternative on the table. There never was.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: why did certain people play games with the emotions of livestock farmers? The government, perhaps buying itself time to manage the fallout. The parties, peddling false promises in the belief that populism wins votes. It doesn’t — not for anyone except the populists themselves. That’s why it’s a losing game from the first move. Yet somehow, not everyone in the party machine has grasped this, and some apparatchiks still believe that selling people empty hope earns them political credit. It doesn’t. It destroys their credibility — and when the bill comes due, everyone pays.
That’s the general picture. Because what we’ve witnessed these past few days is theatre of the absurd on a political stage where the lead players — government and party chiefs alike — have proved woefully unequal to the moment. Crises demand leaders who can hold the line against populism, against the trafficking of false hope, against hollow slogans — the very currency that flourishes in the age of social media omnipotence.
The pandemic of 2020–21, like the financial crisis before it, showed that political decisions are not subject to a popularity referendum. They are judged on results. Mistakes were made then, of course. But what endures, when the dust settles, is the overall outcome. And for those willing to look without blinkers, that outcome — under the circumstances — was not a bad one. Those crises were overcome. Cyprus, in large measure, turned the page.
The foot-and-mouth crisis need not have reached the scale it has. The primary responsibility lies with the technocrats at the Agriculture Ministry, and it is a heavy one. The entrenched interests within the civil service — that bureaucratic mentality that characterises so many state bodies — are a dead weight dragging an entire country into inefficiency. Not in every case, but in far too many, the civil service operates as a state within a state.
No government, no party, no politician has ever had the courage or the backbone to take that establishment on. We have said it before: the civil service contains many dedicated and talented officials. The tragedy is that the system swallows them whole. In the case of foot-and-mouth, if the right people had done their jobs properly, we would not be here.
And yet — this also becomes a question of political responsibility. Maria Panayiotou cannot handle this. And it is not only foot-and-mouth. There was the water crisis. There were the wildfires. No one expects the minister to grab a hosepipe and fight fires herself, or to vaccinate cattle, or to conduct farm inspections, or to pray to the heavens for enough rain to fill the reservoirs. But the bare minimum — the absolute baseline — is that she grasps what running a ministry actually demands: competence, political vision, a strategy for managing crises when they hit.
The political head of a ministry is the one who must identify the right policies and drive them through. Who must have the capacity to interrogate what civil servants present as fact, to push back, to lead. To do that, you need either the ability or the experience. At the Agriculture Ministry today, there is neither the political competence nor the crisis-management experience to handle issues of this gravity. The situation is that simple.
If Maria Panayiotou cannot read the room clearly enough to resign of her own accord, then the responsibility falls squarely on President Christodoulides to dismiss her.
