President Christodoulides offered a positive outlook for 2025 in his New Year message, which would be building on the government’s work of last year. He said 2024 was the year we felt “the first substantive, tangible results of our policies, policies that put the person at the epicentre, with an emphasis on the many and not the few.”

On the domestic front “we set in motion brave solutions to achieve our central target, that is, the improvement of daily living and quality of life of every Cypriot citizen, moving into a new era, more modern and more inclusive,” he added. It is good that he has put aside the ‘middle class,’ which his Finance Minister Makis Keravnos, made it his mission to support and expand.

Keravnos’ obsession with the middle class seemed rather peculiar considering there were also low-income earners in our society, who never got a mention but were in greater need of support. At least Christodoulides avoided focusing on the middle class, saying he wanted to improve every Cypriot citizen’s quality of life and that every citizen was at the epicentre of government policy.

Every government wants to improve the daily lives and standard of living of its citizens, but how this is achieved is open to debate. For example, there can be no doubt that the Christodoulides government has improved the standard of living of public sector workers who have been given substantial pay rises in the form of CoLA and across the board pay increases in these 22 months.

There were no such financial boosts for the majority of private sector workers, who had to get by with the VAT cuts on essential products, subsidies of electricity bills and the temporary cut of the consumer tax on petrol. These support measures, aimed at helping citizens deal with higher prices amounted to €700m said the president in his address, although it is unclear whether the low-income earners benefited.

The support measures the president referred to were of little relevance in the broader scheme of things, although they are good for communications purposes. What was of greater importance, and the government could have taken the credit for, was that the economy performed very well in 2024. The government could pay €700m in support measures and still have a budget surplus because the economy was on a healthy growth path, and tax revenue was high.

This is what governments should emphasise. Without putting the economy on a healthy footing, an exercise that could cause some pain, neither citizens’ daily living nor their standard of living will improve. Things go well for citizens when the economy is growing and not when they are at the epicentre of government policy, as the popular rhetoric, embraced by all the parties, misleadingly suggests. It suffices to say that the main slogan of the cooperative banks was that they were human-centred, much good that did for them.

The Christodoulides government should focus on keeping the economy growing in 2025, just as it had done last year, and everything else will take care of itself, with or without people at the epicentre of policies.