HOW BIZARRE that just a few hours after his return from Kyiv and the meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Prezniktwo announced a cabinet reshuffle that completely overshadowed his historic and significant visit, which involved the hardship of a 10-hour train trip each way.
The trip went very well but talk that our Prez had presented his own 25-point peace plan for ending the war in Ukraine turned out to be fake news. From a publicity point of view, the visit did not go very well as it received no coverage in the international media and failed to raise the world profile of our Prez.
There was also a little disappointment as Zelenskiy failed to condemn the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus, despite our Prez having no qualms about slamming the “brutal and unprovoked invasion” by Russia during the meeting.
This was mentioned back in Kyproulla, by Mother Russia’s cheerleaders, who were keen to point out Zelenskiy’s good relations with President Erdogan. President Putin’s excellent relations with Erdogan are ignored, because of Russia’s principled position on the Cyprob which never involved condemning Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Cyprus.
THE RESHUFFLE, according to Bimbishis, the Prez’s official spokesman at Phil, has a “clearly centre-right direction with a social liberalism profile”. Who in the presidential palace thinks up these nonsensical labels and tells Bimbishis to write them beats me.
“Centre-right” is another way of saying “believes in anything that will get him a ministerial post” but what is a “social liberalism profile”? Do they believe in same-sex marriage, adoption of children by gay couples, euthanasia or in the decriminalisation of marijuana?
The Prez went for a “formation that was more political and less technocratic”, wrote Bimbishis, which is another way of saying he was preparing for the presidential elections by appointing party affiliated mediocrities rather than friends and relatives of his wife, also known as technocrats.
One technocrat who was tipped for the chop, because she consistently failed to attain mediocrity in the performance of her duties, Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou was surprisingly kept. Panayiotou enjoys the protection of the Prez’s missus, with whom she made orange juice with oranges from the trees in the presidential palace gardens and distributed to schools.
The orange juice initiative made her an untouchable technocrat.
I WAS surprised that the communist sympathising Labour Minister Yiannis Panayiotou, who did everything in his power to keep the union bosses happy and was in the process of arranging an increase in the minimum wage, was ruthlessly sacked. Did the Prez fear that he was getting too popular and taking too much of the credit for the union-friendly decisions?
The one who probably deserved to be sacked was instead transferred to a presidential palace sinecure that is invariably given to a favourite of the Prez that needs the money or the status. I refer to former justice minister Marios Hartsiotis, the closet Elamite with a penchant for saying the wrong thing in public.
Hartiotis was appointed presidential commissioner a post in which he will collect a good salary in order to do and say nothing. It is a dream job for anyone seeking a good work-life balance heavily weighted on the life side.
TAKING over the ministry of justice is a retired national guard officer, Constantinos Fytiris who had served in our imaginary navy, reaching the rank of vice admiral. In the last six years he was the general manager of the new Ayia Napa marina.
The Prez must hope the new minister, who reportedly has links to Disy, will bring some naval discipline to the police force.
There will also be a new deputy minister of social welfare. Marilena Evangelou, a former hack who got the job because she was in the Christodoulides presidential campaign team, will be replaced by Clelia Hadjistefanou Papaellina. According to Bimbishis, her appointment “is considered a rapprochement move towards the well-known business family”.
This implies that the Prez had fallen out with the Papaellinas family, which had funded his election and heavily promoted him on its television station Alpha. There are two Papaellinas businesses families – related – one that owns AlphaMega and Alpha TV and another which owns Beauty Line but Bimbishis did not specify which of the two groups the rapprochement was directed at. Presumably Clelia is a technocrat.
THE OBVIOUS political appointments were two. Diko’s Neophytos Charalambides, a lawyer from Limassol, got the health ministry while Dipa deputy Marinos Moushiouttas was given the labour ministry.
Moushiouttas comes from a traditional Diko family that did very well out of its close ties with the late Spy Kyp. Marinos’ father Nicos was a Diko deputy while his uncle Andreas served as labour minister. He will continue the Moushiouttas tradition at the labour ministry, but as a Dipa man.
I have to say I felt sorry for the axing of energy minister Giorgos Papanastasiou, who had a successful career in the energy sector before his appointment and was very well acquainted with energy issues, but was liability when it came to communications.
He loved to speak on radio and television, but he had no awareness of what he could and what he could not say. Perhaps now that he is no longer in government, he can reveal all the scandalous shenanigans that led to the awarding of the Vasiliko gas terminal to the Chinese consortium with catastrophic results. It was the only thing he had managed to stop himself talking about when he was minister.
WHILE Diko and Dipa were kept happy by the reshuffle, Edek went into a sulk, making its hurt feelings known on Friday night. It issued a statement which said: “The reshuffle causes a strong dissatisfaction in Edek. Edek’s sincere attempt to contribute with proposals and positions to the success of the government’s work and its behaviour that asked for nothing in exchange, it seems, were not appreciated.”
The party’s political bureau will meet on Sunday to decide what to do. Hopefully it will not decide to withdraw from the government because that would mean Maria Panayiotou, an Edekite, would have to step down as orange juice minister.
MANY here in Kyproulla took great offence at the description of our Kyproulla as a regional “abscess” by the US ambassador in the Turkey, Tom Barrack.
Speaking to a Kathimerini journalist outside the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, Barrack said the US was trying to be a bridge between Greece and Turkey and said that Cyprus was a “key part” of any regional solution.
Cyprus, he said, had to be included in any effort to bring stability to the eastern Mediterranean, because “you cannot have an abscess in the middle of an otherwise healthy body.” In short, without a settlement of the Cyprob the abscess will continue to infect relations between Greece and Turkey.
This undermines our Prez’s theory that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We have been the problem for decades and have refused to have anything to do with the solution that would stop us being the abscess.
