Plenty of politicians have been holding forth on the Cyprus problem for years. Precious few have ever sat down and actually studied it. Even party leaders remind us at every turn just how little they know about it. Because the Cyprus problem isn’t about firing off a statement. It’s about knowing the issue inside out.
Otherwise you risk ending up as a mere errand boy for someone who has been boycotting the National Council for three years now. Fidias Panayiotou, wearing his hat as leader of Direct Democracy, turned up at the last session of the National Council to say his piece yet again.
In his public statement, though, he didn’t just come across as unprepared. He sounded like he was parroting what someone had told him to say, to show that he too knows a thing or two about the Cyprus problem. Warning us that he would be tough on the President, he said, among other things, that “for 111 months we have had no progress on the Cyprus problem that would allow talks to restart…”.
Yes, tomorrow marks 111 months since the talks at Crans-Montana collapsed (July 6, 2017): 3,378 days without fresh negotiations. So far, Fidias’s maths looks right. It isn’t, though…
For it to add up, we would have needed the same President of the Republic from then until now. We didn’t. So how can he be “tough” on President Nikos Christodoulides, when Christodoulides only took charge of the Cyprus problem on March 1, 2023?
Let’s make it simple, for Fidias and for whoever is writing his crib sheets, by splitting the 111 months into two periods:
(a) Nicos Anastasiades, 6.7.2017 to 28.2.2023: 2,064 days, or 67 months and 22 days.
(b) Nikos Christodoulides, 1.3.2023 to today (5.10.2026): 1,314 days, or 43 months and four days.
At his first appearance at the National Council, Fidias declared that he didn’t know the Cyprus problem and was there to learn. Instead of learning, though, he’s trying to pass the exams with crib sheets, while doing the bidding of those currently staying away from the National Council.
Whoever drew up the crib sheet deliberately left out all the movement since 2023, such as the appointment of an envoy and the UN Secretary-General’s visit. At the same time, it slyly implies that Christodoulides was handling the Cyprus problem as Anastasiades’s government spokesman and foreign minister. He wasn’t.
There’s another angle, too, and it spells trouble for the Cyprus problem: all the noise from Pindarou lately over who will be DISY’s candidate. Excessive noise that, without doubt, was stirred up by Averof Neofytou’s announcements, statements and interventions.
This tension, which concerns not so much the 2028 presidential election as a pre-pre-election climate, could well be used by some in the coming days as an excuse to put the process on hold. Just as it was with the parliamentary elections and Cyprus’s EU presidency.
So we may yet be told that, because of the elections coming up (and the occupied north has its own “parliamentary” process under way), we’ll have to wait.
That would suit Erhurman and Turkey on one side very nicely, and on the other, certain presidential hopefuls. Hopefuls who will bank on the deadlock to sell themselves as “presidents of a solution”, airbrushing Turkey and the occupation leader out of the picture and dumping the blame for 111 months without negotiations solely on President Christodoulides…
