Opinion

The average observer has long been disillusioned with the House of Representative’s lack of organisation and chronic procrastination on bills that should have been passed years ago, but things came to a head on April 20th when Attorney-General Costas Clerides strongly criticised parliament’s irresponsibility in passing bills that had not even been checked by the Legal Services.

President Nicos Anastasiades has referred several of the 44 bills passed in the House’s last session before May’s elections to the attorney-general on constitutional grounds. But House Speaker Yiannakis Omirou said that the legislative didn’t have time to study them in depth, thus passing the buck to the attorney general’s office, which now has to do the groundwork in 15 days. Given that the legal services are already dealing with intensive investigations into multiple corruption cases, this derogation of responsibility comes at a particularly bad time.

Omirou adds that the House already debated, voted on and passed 1,700 bills during its term. In fact, this high number was largely due to external pressure to comply with the bailout agreement with the IMF and ECB, which insisted on reforming the economy - a job that should have been done internally from the beginning. But due to vested interests, corruption and a slow-to-change mentality, the economy has lost its direction and momentum, leaving thousands without jobs and futures. Faced with high levels of disapproval both domestically and internationally, the House actually had to do some work. (Yes, people were surprised.)

Now that the country has exited the bailout deal, it’s back to laissez-faire attitudes and what appears to be a lack of seriousness about the continuing need for economic reform and modernisation.

Do the bondholders who lost their savings in the economic and financial crash deserve to have their debts written off? Perhaps, because they were sold complex financial instruments (Co-Convertible Bonds) that they were not sophisticated enough to understand, and then the banks persuaded them to use the bonds as collateral for loans, so they could offset the interest paid on the bonds with interest revenue on the loans. But passing a law that is not carefully considered and legally viable doesn’t do anyone any good. It raises the question: can anyone have their loans written off?

Wasn’t the House obliged to pass the privatisation bill for the semi-government organisations CYTA and EAC? Yes, but they didn’t, raising the question - will they ever learn? Economic stagnation and overloading the public’s ability to pay for these expensive ventures has already shown negative results, so it’s pure self-interest on the part of AKEL, DIKO and the trade unions that is keeping the necessary modernisation from happening.

That aside, the prospect that the public interest will continue to be seen as a plaything for MPs own interests is looming large again. Far from impressing anyone that the House is determined to prevent the same mistakes that led to the crash in the first place, it is creating even more negative sentiment and doubts about its seriousness as a democratic institution.

What does it say about our democracy that it’s being used to enrich cartels, political parties and trade unions instead of fixing the massive social and economic problems that we still face? What does it say about the credibility of the MPs if they backtrack on every promise they made when they needed the cash from the Troika?

Not a great deal, that’s for sure.

Here’s hoping that the new legislative body can do a better job for Cyprus and that a more balanced, unselfish approach prevails.