These are the “achievements” of the Anastasiades-Averof-Christodoulides government

 

Article by Giorgos Loukaides, leader of AKEL’s Parliamentary Group and Political Bureau member

2 December 2022, “Haravgi” newspaper

The Minister of Finance, in his last speech outlining the state budget of the outgoing Averof-Christodoulides government in Parliament, repeated the narrative of the government’s supposed “success story”, for which, according to them, we ungrateful Cypriots should be grateful, instead of judging [according to opinion polls] the outgoing government negatively or very negatively in percentages above 70%.

The tragic thing is that the would-be successors of the outgoing government [Averof and Christodoulides], even though they have driven the people crazy, want to apparently continue with the same policies and more.

So as we bid them farewell, we thank them warmly for their “achievements” in the economy too, as our fellow citizens have experienced them to their bones. In particular, among other things, we thank them:

• For the predatory economy, with the setting up of the rotten ‘golden’ passports industry, which disgraced us internationally and severely damaged the reputation and credibility of the Cyprus economy,
• For the haircut on bank deposits, when, despite the fact that they cursed it as disastrous during the pre-election campaign back then and pledged not to permit it, they agreed and imposed it at the dawn of their presidency, leading the country and its people to unprecedented desperate circumstances,
• For the imposition of a brutal and inhumane, neo-colonial austerity therapy and impoverishment of our people, when they shifted the burden on the many vulnerable, the victims of the banking robbery (working people, pensioners, the welfare state, education, health, and so on). This was a therapy which, in fact, they presented as their own ideological manifesto,
• For the transfer of the benefits of growth recorded primarily to the privileged few (when this growth came belatedly due to the form of therapy they had imposed), thus widening even further the gap between the share of wages in the economy and that of profits,
• Because, in the end, the Anastasiades-Averof-Christodoulides government never got tired of approving laws in favour of the banks, as DISY President Averof Neophytou himself has been stating since 2014, thus imposing a particularly heterogeneous institutional framework to the detriment of borrowers and depositors and thus exacerbating the abusive, arbitrary practices of the bankers,
• For the premeditated crime committed of the closing down of the Cyprus Cooperative Bank in order to save the Hellenic Bank, an act which on the one hand deprived the country of a huge social gain, a counterweight to the commercial banks, and on the other hand created 8 billion euros in liabilities to the state,
• For the scandalous promotion of the privatisation of profitable semi-public/governmental organisations at the expense of the public interest, as was the case with the privatisation of the port of Limassol, where unfortunately AKEL did not have the alliances we subsequently built to prevent the privatisation process of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority ATHK, the Cyprus Electricity Authority AHK and others,
• Because, according to Eurostat, we were bottom of the table across Europe in supporting people’s incomes during the pandemic, but also because due to years of under-funding of the public health sector, medical and paramedical staff were to wage the battle against the Covid pandemic without “arms and ammunition”,
• Because today, according to figures released by Eurostat again, we are still lag bottom of the table in the provision of support towards households and businesses by the state to deal with the price of energy costs, when the government has unexpectedly collected over a billion euros from citizens in revenues as a result of increased taxes due to the price of energy,
• Because, correspondingly, the Anastasiades-Averof-Christodoulides government have shown social callousness when it comes to the rights of working people (about which the Minister did not say a single word about in his speech in Parliament) which they first undermine as employers (the promotion of the purchase of services policy, flexible forms of employment), as well as towards the vulnerable groups of the population who, as a government, have been content with providing the absolute minimum and therefore insufficient to offer them dignity,
• Because the Anastasiades-Averof-Christodoulides government have contributed to condemning the young generation to be the first to live worse than the previous generation, with starvation wages on the one hand and, on the other, a cost of living that does not permit them access to the right to housing, but which generally prevents them from creating their own family,
• Because their results remain poor to zero in the exploitation of our own natural gas or in the importation of LNG for power generation purposes, with the result that the people are currently paying more than EUR 200 million a year in penalties for pollutants,
• Because, respectively, the Anastasiades-Averof-Christodoulides government have kept us at the bottom of the European league in the promotion of renewable energy sources, the circular economy and in general in the promotion of the green transition, but instead they have not hesitated to sacrifice the protection of nature and the environment in their efforts to serve powerful private interests,
• Because in the field of digital transformation, we have also remained among those lagging far behind at the bottom of the relevant able across Europe, a challenge which, for the public sector, translates into undermining the objective of a modern and efficient state that should serve rather than be inconvenient for citizens.

The list of “achievements” of the Averof-Christodoulides government is endless. We will stop here. Just as the outgoing government must stop right here.

We have had enough of them. It is up to citizens not to allow any of the would-be successors of the Anastasiades government to saddle us with similar and worse achievements, as they themselves declare their intention to do.

Instead of continuation, we choose progressive change with a balanced and orderly economic policy. With social sensitivity and respect for working people’s rights. For the creation of a favourable business environment. For green and digital transformation. For an effective state.