Cyprus Mail 18 May 2021
Finance Minister Constantinos Petrides defended the government’s ambitious recovery and resilience scheme on Tuesday, accusing an opposition leader of lying for a handful of votes.
Speaking on state radio, CyBC, Petrides said Diko chairman Nicolas Papadopoulos was prepared to scupper every plan introduced by the government for political gain.
“It is really very sad to feel that implementation depends on such politicians,” Petrides said.
The scheme, whose outline was unveiled by the president on Monday will be funded through €1.2bn from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, and €1.8bn from the Policy Coherence Fund.
EU members will receive the money, provided they roll out broad reforms that will change current growth models.
Petrides accused Papadopoulos of lying continuously about various issues ranging from vaccination rates to the financial assistance granted to businesses during the lockdowns.
“Papadopoulos has proven many times that for a handful of votes he is prepared to walk on the smouldering remains of the Cypriot economy,” the finance minister said.
Good examples were Diko’s rejection of the state budget on grounds that were not related with its contents, and its change of position over local administration reforms.
The minister rejected suggestions the government had timed the announcement of the scheme with the May 30 parliamentary elections, arguing that this was the time the schemes were being submitted to the EU by member states.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the submission of the Cypriot plan on Twitter on Monday, adding that the goal was to have funds flowing by the summer.
Petrides expressed concern over the composition of parliament after the election, whether it would be functional or whether opposition parties would reject anything the government proposed.
Papadopoulos said Anastasiades presented a new growth model every year and every year he failed.
However, he said, this year, the “annual” statement should have started with apologies to the Cypriot people.
“An apology because the bad management of the pandemic and the bad management of the economy by his government has led the economy to paralysis,” Papadopoulos said.
For months, he said, Cyprus was among the worst performers in the EU in vaccination rates and was first in infections “resulting in important tourist markets like the UK ranking Cyprus in the ‘dangerous’ countries, risking our tourism industry going through one more summer essentially without revenue.”
CYPRUS MAIL - Our View - Unions likely to stymie ambitious Cyprus-tomorrow plan
Presenting the government’s plan ‘Cyprus – tomorrow’ on Monday, President Anastasiades described it as “ambitious and pragmatic”. Not only was the EU-funded plan geared towards helping the recovery of the economy, but it was also “the creation of a new vision for the country” that would work as “a road-map for the post-Covid era”.
The main objectives were to turn Cyprus into a resilient economy with high productivity and competitiveness, with an education system that provides the skills needed in the future, a country that is a pioneer of the green and digital transformation, with a resilient healthcare system, a welfare state that would protect all those in need and into a state with rule of law, transparency and accountability and strong mechanisms for fighting corruption.
Anyone who wants the country to move forward would back these plans by the government as they could indeed transform Cyprus. Executing them, however, might be easier said than done, given the snail’s pace at which reform and change are implemented. Public sector unions, always backed by the opposition parties, have for years been a major obstacle to reform because they fear their members’ interests and privileges would be affected.
After the meltdown of 2013, everyone agreed that local government was in need of radical restructuring, but both reform bills submitted to the legislature have been rejected. For years now, the government has been trying to open up the electricity market, but every attempt has been blocked by the EAC unions that do not want to surrender the authority’s monopoly – and the parties support them. It is one of the main reasons for the poor record on renewable energy sources. As regards education, Anastasiades said an evaluation system would be introduced for teachers, a change teaching unions have blocked for the last 20 years.
How will all these ambitious changes, blocked for years by the union-party syndicate, be implemented? We dread to think how Pasydy will react to digital transformation which would make a sizeable number of public service jobs superfluous and limit the power of many officials. It would be no surprise if the union’s members undermine all implementation plans, just like their comrades at EAC have done for years.
If these plans are to be pursued successfully, it is imperative for the government to devise implementation strategies – setting out short- and long-term targets, securing backing (or neutrality) from opposition parties, formulating a communications scheme among other things – for each reform objective. It would be naïve to think that these reforms can be introduced without strong resistance from the unions, which have traditionally been the biggest opponents of change.
