Since Sunday evening, we have all been reading a great deal about the electoral success of a young man who managed to secure one of the six seats in the European Parliament.
Some have described it as a punishment for the political system, while others have called it a form of ‘revolution’ by the electorate.
Now that we are several days removed from the June 9 elections, I believe it is time to start looking at things calmly and without emotion. Fidias is a young man who is perhaps the most famous Cypriot internationally, considered (by general consensus) successful in his field, earning big money, and who has now chosen to take on a new challenge (like the many others before) … and he has succeeded yet again. And surely, he won’t stop here, as his dream was never to become a politician or an MEP.
Like you, I noticed many rejoicing because an individual – a young man – managed to get more votes than most political parties. They saw in him a “terminator of the party establishment” and cheered it on. Others began to view it as a punishment for a corrupt system.
Neither a revolution nor a sudden turn towards anti-establishment sentiment occurred on Sunday. Let me remind you that we still live on the island of Cyprus, which may boast beautiful sun and sea (favoured by most voters in the capital) but has very few revolutions or even uprisings in its long history.
If anything characterises us as a people, it is our propensity for imitation and our ease in accepting whatever is served to us by foreigners. A glance at the history of the Cyprus problem clearly illustrates this. So, we are not known for our revolutionary spirit…
After the shock of the election results, a sense of awe towards Fidias and his achievement set in. As soon as the interpretation emerged that the parties were being punished, everyone started talking about ‘punishing the system and the party establishment’, and the number of self-proclaimed anti-establishment figures grew.
Seriously? Have Cypriots suddenly become anti-establishment? Which system are they revolting against, and how do they intend to go up against it? It would be good if someone could explain to us what they mean by this and how they plan to take on the system.
Are the 18-year-olds who showed up to vote on Sunday morning with their mothers revolutionaries or anti-establishment? Or those who, instead of giving a straightforward reason for voting for Feidias, ramble on and on, almost apologetically, trying to justify why they didn’t vote for a party, hiding behind platitudes like ‘they’re all the same’, ‘we’re tired of the same old faces’, and ‘enough with the parties’.
Let me just focus on the phrase ‘they’re all the same’ that I heard repeated quite often: Did anyone bother to look at how many of the candidates were, in fact, ‘the same old faces’? Surely not, because if they had, they would have seen that the majority of candidates were not only new to the European Parliament ballot but were also first-time contenders in any election.
Fidias may have chosen to go against the system personally and do things that 99.9999% of Cypriots would not dare, but he did not lead a revolution. He opted for a path different from the one laid out by the Cypriot system, which typically values university degrees. How many people do you know who would dare to do something similar?
Let’s start with a revolution against the private tutoring system before we move on to anything else…
Read more:
