Article: “I Had Never Voted in a European Election Before”

Two months have passed since the European and local elections in Cyprus, and the general feeling is that we have all returned to our routines, leaving the winners to enjoy their success and the defeated to return to quieter days.

So why reopen those wounds? The reason was a chance visit to a coffee shop of the kind that, as is customary in Cyprus, has its own political colour and affiliation—red here, blue across the road, another shade in the next neighbourhood.

“I had never voted in a European election before,” a pensioner told the group that meets there every afternoon for coffee and conversation about current affairs: football, the heatwave, traffic cameras and, of course, politics. The television is always on in the corner. Occasionally, a murder interrupts the usual subjects, while developments in the Middle East cause concern and, for some, fear.

Their conversation caught my attention and, since they offered me coffee, I felt entitled both to listen and to join in. I arrived just as they were discussing MEP Fidias Panayiotou—not Loucas Fourlas, Michalis Hadjipantela, Giorgos Georgiou, Geadis Geadi or Costas Mavrides. Six men, incidentally, and I heard no complaint about the absence of women from Cyprus’s elected six.

Almost two months after the election, “Fidias” remained part of the public conversation, helped by television channels rebroadcasting the young MEP’s social media updates about each step he took in Brussels—including his dispute with relatives of missing persons during the sombre July anniversaries.

“I voted for him,” Mr Costas declared bravely, despite having been loyal to the left since childhood. “I told the party. I’m not afraid. I didn’t even know Fidias until the other day. I saw him on television shortly before the election. He was different from the others. He spoke without repeating the same old things and, above all, I could understand him.”

The others challenged him. They argued that voters like him had sent an inexperienced person to the European Parliament to vote on matters affecting their lives. The most party-loyal blamed him for AKEL’s losses.

Mr Yiannis, a retired civil servant who still dresses formally for his visit to the coffee shop, interrupted: “I always knew that in European elections we sent six people to Belgium for paid holidays. Now Fidias has said it too. I was right—the money is good. They all set themselves up nicely.”

I left the coffee shop but spent hours analysing the conversation from a communication perspective: candidates who appear and disappear at election time, passing figures, colourful characters, familiar faces, celebrities, people who will accept any chair so long as it carries political office—and now Fidias, a category of his own.

As voters, how and when will we measure his success as an MEP? And as communication consultants, how would we build the next “Fidias” capable of defeating the original?

George Constantinou
Communication Consultant
CØNNEKT Communication Consultants