Our View: Political games have turned local elections into farce

Candidacies were submitted on Wednesday and Thursday for the most complex elections ever held in Cyprus. On the same day, June 9, people would be voting for Members of European Parliament and an unprecedented number of local government officials.

There are 63 candidates for the six seats in the European Parliament while for the local authority elections, which include school boards, there are 3,232 candidates. Although the vote for the European Parliament is straightforward, the vote for local government is anything but as people would have to vote for municipal councillors and a deputy mayor of their former municipality, a mayor of the metropolitan municipality into which the former municipality has been incorporated and governor of the district to which the metropolitan municipality belongs.

To explain things more clearly, we should take the example of the metropolitan Nicosia municipality – it will be made up of the municipalities of Engomi, Aglandjia, Ayios Dhometios and Nicosia. There will therefore be four deputy mayors, one for each of the above, with no authority other than to perform tasks assigned to them by the mayor. There will be one municipal council, made up of 32 councilors, representing the four former municipalities, plus the four redundant deputy mayors.

Apart from voting for councilors, a deputy mayor and a mayor, people will also vote for a Nicosia district governor, under whose authority all five new Nicosia municipalities will be. Each of the five districts will have an elected governor, whose responsibilities have not been clearly explained. Will the governor be able to overrule the mayors of the district, especially as they could belong to a different party and want different things? Will the governor only deal with technocratic matters, in which case what would the technocrat that oversees such matters – the state’s chief district officer – be doing?

The introduction of an elected district governor was not in the government reform plans, but one of the parties thought this seemed a good idea, during the mindless chopping and changing of the local government bills in the legislature. And so, out of the blue and without any rational justification, on the whim of a party, we will have an elected district governor, for whom there is no meaningful role.

It is an illustration of the superficiality with which political parties deal with important matters, always placing their narrow interests above everything. Reform of the local government had been a recommendation of the Troika in 2013, because the existing system was costly, inefficient, cumbersome and offered a very poor service to people. It also defeated the aim of local democracy, as the big number of municipalities made them financially unviable depending on central government to survive.

Foreign advisors were brought, the first group proposing the number of municipalities being cut from 30 to five and the second to eight; a third group of advisors proposed 12. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts by the Anastasiades government to reform the system, it finally proposed 18 municipalities which were increased to 20 by the parties, which had no interest in streamlining or rationalising local authorities so they could offer better services. The parties’ primary concern was to create as many positions as possible for their members, hence the idea for the deputy mayors, who will have no responsibilities but be paid €3,000 per month.

No objective criteria, such as population size, were used in the creation of the new municipalities. For example, the Paphos district, with a much smaller population than the Limassol district will have the same number of municipalities – four – while Larnaca will have the same number as Nicosia. Municipalities that should have merged were not because the serving mayor made a fuss, and his party ensured the municipality was preserved.

The horse-trading by the parties turned the reform into a farce. A costly malfunctioning system will be replaced by something that will cost the taxpayer more, even though one of the main objectives was to reduce waste of public money. And it remains to be seen how the authorities of the district governor and the may will be exercised.

As the interior minister said a few months ago, there is no turning back now. It would be a very good idea, however, for the ministry’s technocrats to start planning the reform of the administrative monster designed by the political parties, immediately after June’s elections.