It’s like reading a historical saga stuffed with intrigue, traitors and the betrayed. And it’s all spilling out at once, and nobody is sparing us any of it.
Averof Neofytou got the ball rolling by putting betrayal on the agenda. The betrayed, he assured us (meaning himself), does not betray. So everyone can relax: he will never betray them. Suddenly the betrayal industry was buzzing. Then he brought up the fish tavern betrayal, though that is probably just the latest instalment. There are older betrayals too, piled up into a mountain.
On Tuesday, Giorgos Pamborides weighed in with more, to get us all into the spirit of the great party of the right. He understands, he said, the personal bitterness Averof feels. Neofytou was betrayed by Nicos Anastasiades, his closest ally, on whose account he took a great deal of flak. Then he was betrayed by Nikos Christodoulides, his personal pick, whom he promoted to a string of posts. Then his other personal pick, Annita Demetriou, whom he lifted into a series of positions, betrayed him too.
The way the story is being told, though, doesn’t the betrayed man share some of the blame? Averof, aka the fox of Argaka, is famed for his political cunning. So how clever a politician is he really, if he never noticed he was picking and propping up traitors?
And that’s not all. In Anastasiades’s second term, Pamborides says, Harris Georgiades was lined up to be foreign minister. But a game was played against him and he was shut out. As Pamborides put it: “The game was played by Nikos Christodoulides and Averof Neofytou, and they managed to shut him out so that Nikos Christodoulides could become foreign minister. And I know the behind-the-scenes story very well.”
Georgiades, naturally, tells it rather differently, and says nothing about backroom dealings. “It was my mistake to ask to move to the Foreign Ministry,” he said. “I corrected that mistake within 24 hours. I had things to do at the Finance Ministry and decisions that had to be taken.” One day he asked, the next he withdrew. So if Pamborides is right, Averof and Christodoulides must have spent the whole night working the game against him.
The verdict? This isn’t a party. It’s Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’, the ultimate film about betrayal, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. Dare I say it, it also looks a bit like the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, the most famous poker tournament there is, where a Cypriot, Evagoras Evagorou, won a million dollars at the final table this week. As for DISY’s final table, it’ll be fascinating to see who’s left sitting at it. But it’s early days. There are more episodes to come.
Plenty of people have a part in this soap opera, and share the blame for turning politics and public life into a laughing stock: that is exactly what happens when the backroom plotting of the country’s biggest party is dragged into the light. But the lion’s share of the blame lies with the party’s leader, Annita Demetriou. She had three years (this all began with the 2023 presidential election) to get a grip on the party she inherited and put it back on solid ground. She failed.
Instead of healing the wounds of 2023, she cut them deeper. One minute she was complaining that Christodoulides had joined the same European party as her, the European People’s Party, when she should have been applauding the fact that Cyprus would have two voices in it. The next she was cranking up the opposition rhetoric, then dialling it down again (for the parliamentary elections). One minute she was cosying up to far-right positions, the next to centre-right ones. One minute she was starring in a Fidias video for the sake of a second term in parliament, the next she was appointing some 30 shadow ministers to look ready to govern.
That was, and still is, the core strategy from 2023 to 2028. But the party has stayed trapped in the grip of personal agendas and betrayal. And just look at the results.
