I’ll hold my hands up: Giorgos Pamborides’s reply to Yiannis Karousos was a textbook comeback. Razor-sharp. Because that, it seems, is what it takes to knock some sense into DISY, as they say in Troulloi.
This time it was Stella Kyriakides who struck the match. Not that she meant to. The others are just tinder-dry. She had decided that, with everything going on in her party, “silence is not a responsible stance”. In that spirit, she announced that in the party’s internal election to nominate its candidate, and on criteria she set out, she felt duty-bound to say publicly that she backs Giorgos Pamborides.
So a woman with Stella Kyriakides’s record isn’t allowed an opinion? Especially when she holds no formal post in DISY today, and speaks as a member and senior figure of a party she served for many years in a string of roles. Well, Yiannis Karousos, now vice-president, went public too, to lecture her. Lecturing Stella, Mr Karousos? Of all people? Heaven help us!
“Those who took on high state or party office with the support of the party,” he wrote, “have a heightened duty to safeguard its unity and to remain even-handed in their public statements.”
As if today’s party office-holders were plaster saints. Campaigning flat out behind the scenes among party members, for or against one of the two candidates? Perfectly fine. Just don’t say it out loud. Yet it is far more honourable to state your view openly than to hide and work in the shadows. Especially given how heated and sprawling the candidacy process has become, with Averof Neofytou’s intervention (and I’m putting it mildly) and Annita Demetriou’s withdrawal.
Pamborides saw red, and let him have it: “Having swallowed the camel of blackmail, having tried to impose omertà on senior figures and the parliamentary group as if we were Ceausescu’s party, and while they themselves campaign from dawn till midnight for their chosen one, they now ‘wail’ about unity when the party’s historic figures speak out in public and wreck their narrative.”
Quite right. He said it all, and good for him. Because “silence is not a responsible stance”. It is a stance of hypocrisy, and it only deepens the incoherence already plaguing them. The country’s largest party thinks it can make a meal of everyone, yet it has ended up as the meze at the political feast of presidential jockeying. They set off on the road to the 2028 presidential election straight from the 2023 election. No clearing of the air. No straight talking. No leadership. They were dragged into decisions and timetables they didn’t want. And in this grim climate, they lecture us about their heightened duty to safeguard the unity of their camp.
Who, exactly? The same people who decided to give members a free vote in the 2023 run-off, then trampled all over the very rule Karousos now lays down for the party’s internal election: that senior figures “remain even-handed in their public statements”, because “the (party’s) base belongs to no one”. Did it belong to someone in 2023? That is when the countdown began, and it still hasn’t stopped. It all started when they thought they owned the base, and that they could get it to vote for AKEL’s candidate because they were furious with “their own” Christodoulides, not over any ideological disagreement.
So was it Ceausescu’s party of omertà all along?
