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With political analysts arguing that Britain is a secretly left-wing nation, the Labour Party was demolished by last week’s general election, “which comprehensively demonstrated that voters prize economic competence above waffly ideology,” said the Economist.
The result also reduced Labour to its lowest number of MPs since 1987 and led swiftly to the resignation of Ed Miliband, its “gutsy but misguided” leader with the race to succeed him immediately underway.
Tony Blair, the centre-right leader of ‘New Labour’, urged party members to stand “for ambition and aspiration as well as compassion and care”. If they ignore him, Labour risks enduring a decade as a parliamentary protest group rather than a credible alternative government and David Cameron will be hoping Labour plumps for another deluded left-winger.
With just 12 months away to our own general election, the political parties (and their leaders) refuse to wake up and smell the coffee, with EDEK backtracking on the most fundamental of national issues by declaring over the weekend that it formally rejects the bizonal, bicommunal federation as a basis for a solution. In an effort to pander to the centre-right rejectionist DIKO and to garner as much as possible from the fellow rejectionists at the Citizens Alliance, the socialists may have shot themselves in the foot, as recently ousted party boss Yiannakis Omirou warned not to take too drastic an action on the Cyprus issue, while some party apparatchiks already distanced themselves from the New EDEK line.
Unlike PM Cameron, however, President Anastasiades does not enjoy the full support of the allegedly ruling DISY party, which is more determined to get its MPs re-elected come next May, as opposed to supporting the administration at its most crucial juncture.
Again, unlike the Conservative leader in the UK, re-elected primarily on the platform of his economic success (and not his fumbling with Scotland or talk of a ‘Brexit’), DISY cannot hope that those on the opposite bench in the House will stumble and fall. On the contrary, AKEL has been allowed to roam freely and throw out sweeteners to any and all who regard themselves as opposition, simply to get its diehard communists re-elected next year and pave the way for a centre-left presidential candidate three years from now.
If DISY wants to be taken seriously by its mostly frustrated voters, than it should stand up and fight for fundamental issues ranging from the economy and privatisations, to keeping the civil service in check. The party leadership does not have a clean nest and this is upsetting voters more, fortunately a phenomenon that is common across the board within all parties.
Or else, all parties could see their seats diminish to half what they are today with loony parties taking charge, just as Syriza has in Greece, and Podemos in Spain.
