In a written statement, President Nicos Anastasiades' meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Schultz were referred to by presidential candidate Achilleas Demetriades, who said that he would discuss with them some unspecified European initiative on the Cyprus problem. Upon his return to the island, Anastasiades ought to inform us what results his tour brought and when and how the European Union will undertake this initiative he has in mind, Demetriades said, adding that he should also explain to us why he has not raised this issue - the European initiative - since 2017 when the UN-sponsored talks were suspended and he left things in a complete deadlock. Since then, he says, the talks have been paralysed, while President Anastasiades rejected the proposal to make the Guterres Framework a strategic agreement for the solution, which was favoured by both the UN and the EU. How did the outgoing president now remember the European Union? How, neither his former foreign minister, nor his negotiator, nor his party leader, thought for so long to propose a more active involvement of the European Union?"
"If there had been a vision and real political will for a solution to the Cyprus problem," he continues, "the least that President Anastasiades could have brought from Berlin, as a tangible result, would have been the example of Willy Brandt. The Social Democrat leader who, as mayor of a divided Berlin, achieved a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats to jointly address the great problems of their country."
Subsequently, Mr. Demetriades stresses that "when a country faces the danger of partition, the leadership does not stand idle, but takes such big and courageous initiatives to prevent it."
In conclusion, he writes that "unfortunately, with this leadership, Cyprus has lost its international credibility and is heading steadily towards the rocks of partition. The outgoing president thinks only of his posterity and his interest is limited to how to pass the baton to his colleagues to follow the same dead-end line."
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