Our View: A functioning democracy needs debate and confrontation

The marathon presidential election campaign, which started a little under a year ago, entered the final straight on Friday with the official submission of candidacies. A record 14 candidates will be standing, even after three who intended to stand withdrew in the last couple of weeks.

The field is split into three groups, although, in theory, all would be competing with each other. Leading the pack are three party-backed front-runners, then there are the three independents, all of whom have been campaigning earnestly, and the Elam candidate. The remaining seven candidates, we presume, are standing for the fun of it.

With just four weeks remaining until the vote, the contest which has been moving along rather slowly, should now become a sprint, at least for the three front-runners, who will be looking to advance to the second Sunday elections. With Edek-Diko-Dipa candidate Nikos Christodoulides way ahead in opinion polls, the real battle will be between Akel’s Andreas Mavroyiannis and Disy’s Averof Neophytou, both seeking second spot. It will be closely-run, as Neophytou has a slender lead over Mavroyiannis in the polls.

So far, the campaign has been unspectacular, with no meaningful debate among the candidates, about proposed policies or visions for the country. Each candidate appears to be doing his own thing, engaging in incessant monologues in closed meetings with carefully selected groups of voters, who are told what they want to hear and issuing insipid announcements, bereft of content, that come across as corporate speak.

This is the mode of electoral campaigning chosen by Christodoulides and it has worked very well for him if the opinion polls are correct. In fact, he has repeatedly boasted that he would not engage in public arguments with his rivals, he would not attack them (this is done by his social media trolls allowing him to keep his hands clean), nor would he respond to any accusations levelled against him. His rival candidates, seeing the success he has had with this approach, have been forced to follow suit, to an extent, although they will have realised that in the time remaining they will have to change tack.

Christodoulides has presented his non-engagement with his rivals as a new election campaign culture, more ethical than what we were used to in the past. This approach is not good for a properly functioning democracy, which needs debate and confrontation over political ideas, which demands that politicians disagree and try to persuade people of the rightness of their positions, which needs politicians to challenge each other. The idea of unity, that politicians feel duty-bound to pay lip service to, is usually associated with authoritarian regimes, which do not tolerate being challenged or questioned. Debate and disagreement are the lifeline of a sound democracy and imperatives in a presidential election campaign.

The independent candidates, probably because it is the only way to be heard, have been making effort to instigate some debate, challenging the front-runners’ positions on key issues and highlighting their close links with the outgoing president, but they have not been very successful. Of the three front-runners, only Andreas Mavroyiannis, as the Akel candidate, has been mildly critical of the Anastasiades administration while Averof Neophytou and Christodoulides, understandably, have kept silent. It is left to the independents to talk about corruption, the disastrous handling of the Cyprus problem and lack of government transparency. Are we to assume that the front-runners see nothing that needs fixing?

What of the candidates’ respective election programmes? As is customary in an election campaign, these contain big promises and great visions for the country, but when there is no debate about them, when they are not challenged how are voters to make an informed choice at the ballot box? Everyone will digitalise the state, attract foreign investment, raise living standards, improve Gesy, upgrade education standards among other things, but nobody has told us how they would achieve these lofty goals.

They all promise to help people deal with the problem of rising prices, to protect vulnerable households and bolster the middle class, but nobody has had the decency to tell us how they will do this. Will they raise taxes, increase state borrowing to give cash handouts, impose price ceilings on basic goods or scrap VAT? People have a right to know the practical measures the future president plans to take in order ameliorate the effects of the economic crisis in order to decide who to vote for. But without public debate on vital issues, without candidates arguing about each other’s proposals, there is no way of voters knowing who they can trust to do a good job.

There are four weeks left until we vote. We can only hope that in this time, the candidates will engage in real debate about their respective election programmes and inform us how these would be put into practice. The absence of real debate during an election campaign is not good for democracy.