FORMER President Demetris Christofias attended yesterday’s National Council meeting on the economy. Could the politician, who bears the largest share of the responsibility for the economic catastrophe, have had anything of value to say at such a meeting? Could the man whose poor judgment and irresponsibility demolished the economy make a meaningful contribution to how we should rebuild? We think not.
Christofias was invited to yesterday’s meeting not because of the valuable contribution he would make to a discussion about the economy but because of protocol - all former presidents remain members of the National Council and are welcome to attend meetings. George Vassiliou was also present. We would have thought that Christofias would have been ashamed, or at least embarrassed, to attend a meeting to discuss the mess he had made during his term, but we were wrong.
Perhaps he was there to argue in favour of AKEL’s idiotic proposal for an ‘orderly exit from the euro’ and the return to a heavily devalued Cyprus pound. This proposal, which AKEL has been promoting as some magic formula that would eliminate all the problems being faced by the economy, was the main reason President Anastasiades called the meeting. AKEL’s proposal could, thus, be officially submitted and be forwarded to the experts of the National Economic Council to evaluate it and give their views.
Anastasiades’ calculation is that once the experts have picked the proposal apart and issued their conclusions, the communist party’s campaigning would lose all credibility. Then again, calling a meeting of the National Council to discuss AKEL’s resoundingly idiotic proposal gives it significance it does not merit. We hope the president’s calculation proves correct, even though rational arguments have never stopped our politicians uttering meaningless slogans.
The most fashionable slogan now is that we ‘must disengage from the memorandum’. AKEL’s chief Andros Kyprianou used the slogan repeatedly after yesterday’s meeting and so did EDEK leader Yiannakis Omirou who acknowledged that first the stabilisation of the financial sector had to be secured. EDEK would soon submit its own proposals for the disengagement from the memorandum and the loan agreement. He omitted mention that an economic forum organised by his party a few days ago, concluded that an exit from the euro would be catastrophic.
Yesterday’s meeting would have served a useful purpose if it exposed the sheer stupidity of the demand for the exit from the euro and disengagement from the memorandum. It is unlikely that it would. We suspect that the demand for the disengagement from the memorandum will become as popular as politicians’ meaningless call for a fair, just and lasting settlement of the Cyprus problem.