Our View: Disy blurs opposition role with pro-government rhetoric
The leader of Disy and House president Annita Demetriou is increasingly sounding like a spokesperson of the government, even though her party is theoretically in opposition. This stance is very difficult to understand, especially a month and a half before parliamentary elections, in which Disy could be overtaken as the top party by Akel, which performs its role as an opposition party much more convincingly, despite the occasional outbursts of populism.
Speaking at the Nicosia Economic Congress this week, Demetriou repeated the message of the government aimed at silencing critics by promoting the idea that any form of dissent or questioning of authority threatened to destabilise the country. Investors and entrepreneurs want three things that should never change, said Demetriou – displaying a lack of understanding on how business works in her eagerness to make her point.
“Stability, stability, stability,” were the three things, she said rhetorically, ignoring factors that stifle enterprise such as state bureaucracy, unaccountable officials and an extremely slow justice system that put off investors. We can have amazing stability but what good is it when a business might have to wait five to seven years for the court to settle a straightforward legal dispute or need additional employees just to deal with long-drawn out bureaucratic procedures.
Had Demetriou avoided making these points and resorted to a very superficial economic argument because she did not want to upset the president or was she trying positioning Disy as the party that supports business? Other comments she made, linking economic stability to political stability, indicated that she was singing the tune of the government. Talking about the prospective entry of new parties in the House she said she wanted to have a legislature that “functions in a correct institutional way, for the sake of the stability and not the destabilization of the country.”
Why does Demetriou think there is a risk the entry of new parties to the House could lead to the “destabilisation” of the country? Is our democracy so flimsy and institutions so weak that they could be destabilised by new parties like Alma and Direct Democracy? This unjustified alarmism appears to have become Disy policy for the elections. A day after Demetriou’s scare-mongering, the party spokesman, deputy Onoufrios Koullas, declared that Disy would “continue to be a barricade against all the forces inside and outside the legislature that seek the institutional, political and economic destabilisation to serve their ruthless personal and political ambitions.” He even endorsed “the correct observations of the president of the republic” about the “dangerous and populist proposals of Akel and Elam.”
Disy is entitled to agree with some of the president’s positions, but endorsing the government’s alarmist nonsense about the threatened destabilisation of the country is absurd. No democracy is destabilised by greater political diversity.