North welfare bill to be withdrawn amid ‘communication breakdown’ inside ruling coalition

A bill which will alter the payment of the cost-of-living allowance to Turkish Cypriot public sector workers will be sent back to the Turkish Cypriot legislature’s finance committee, ruling coalition party UBP representative Hasan Tacoy said on Wednesday, while lamenting a “communication breakdown” inside the coalition.

“There is even a communication breakdown among us. We are not informed about the documents which are distributed. Such a lack of communication has never been experienced within a parliamentary party,” he told television channel Kanal T.

He added that had communication between the coalition’s leaders and the wider UBP and the three-party coalition been more open, “the process could have proceeded differently with the unions or the political parties”.

“If communication had been established with us, it would have been different again,” he said, before confirming that rather than making another attempt to pass the bill through a plenary session of the legislature, as had been attempted last week, the matter will now be returned to the committee stage.

Trade union Turk-Sen leader Arslan Bicakli, meanwhile, said during a gathering of trade unions outside ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel’s office that he had also been informed that the coalition’s plan is now to return the issue to the committee.

Ustel had announced on Saturday that the matter would not be debated in the legislature this week, though this decision drew the ire of Serhat Akpinar, the secretary-general of junior coalition partner party the DP.

He decried “the lack of transparency in the process and the failure to utilise necessary consultation mechanisms among the government partners” and said that he and the rest of the DP had only learned of Ustel’s decision through the media.

The coalition had initially announced its intention to halt the payment of the cost-of-living allowance to all public sectors until next year, with thousands of people demonstrating against the plans at the legislature.

After failing to pass the plan through the legislature, the coalition had appeared to take a step back and appeared ready to negotiate with the trade unions.

The unions called their strike off in response, and the coalition then passed a decree stipulating the changes, bypassing the legislature entirely, prompting three more days of protests and strikes until the matter was again discussed in the legislature last Wednesday.

That session ended without result at 4am last Thursday, and the matter remains unsolved.