Cyprus: crisis, excuses, repeat

Power cuts due to surging demand, a looming water shortage, the Takata airbags farrago, malfunctioning electrical appliances turning deadly – and all this seemingly coming together to form the ‘perfect storm’. Are these merely coincidences producing a cumulative effect, signs of a broader malaise, or a little of both?

Likely the latter would be the most informed guess. At the same time, it’s true that bad news sells – “If it bleeds, it leads.” But relegating this to perception would be wrong – these things are happening, they are real.

We reached out to sociologist and known commentator Antonis Raftis to get a sense of the why. We asked whether public life in Cyprus suffers from the so-called ‘last-minute syndrome’ – that is, if matters have to reach breaking point before someone gets their act together.

Raftis did not need much prompting.

“Yes, when it comes to officialdom and the government, we’ve definitely got the last-minute syndrome. Something bad has to happen first before we take action.”

And he starts going through the list, beginning with the fiasco with the defective Takata airbags now subject to recall. Already at least two fatalities have been attributed to this: that of 24-year-old Kyriakos Oxinos who died in 2023, and more recently the death of 19-year-old Styliani Giorgalli in October 2024.

“Oxinos’ father had to make a lot of noise before anyone paid attention to the faulty airbags, even though officials knew about the problem from before,” says the sociologist.

“There is a fear of responsibility, risk aversion, timidity.”

He moves on to the recent power cuts and the fact that the electricity grid got strained to its limit due to the unusually cold spell.

“We have an energy supply on the threshold – so does this mean that every year we will have the same problem, and we’ll say the same things? You’ve got officials going on TV warning of possible blackouts etc…but why didn’t they do anything to prevent it?

“The government encourages people to get solar, but then they cut off the feed to photovoltaic systems. It’s the sort of mixed messaging that causes confusion and dejection.”

According to Raftis, officials in Cyprus like to pass the buck, they’ve become experts at it. This responsibility-shirking, lack of initiative or proactive action always ends up the same way – the public pays the consequences.

“We’re forever chasing after an event, never acting preventively. It seems the only thing officials really care about is their pension benefits. They don’t seem to be justifying their generous salaries.”

He acknowledges that this pattern – reacting only after the fact – does happen in other countries as well. “But the difference with Cyprus is that we’re a very small community, everybody talks to each other, so these problems could be quickly dealt with if the will existed.”

Next up: desalination. “Think of it,” says Raftis. “We’re an island, surrounded by water. You’d expect we’d do a better job with desalination plants rather than wait for it to rain, and whenever it doesn’t rain we just go into panic mode that the dams are almost empty.”

He casts his memory back to the Christofias presidency (2008 to 2013) when the government resorted to importing water on tankers because of the water shortage.

“Right now, a single dam [Mavrokolympos in Paphos] suffered a leak, and so we went into crisis mode. And now they’re racing against time to take corrective action before the summer.

“Prevention is key, yet there is none. So when officials tell us they might have to cut water supply in the summer, this is not a measure – rather it’s punishing us for their own mistakes and omissions.”

Taking a slight tangent, Raftis recalls how as late as the 1970s bishops would make prayers for it to rain whenever the island was beset by drought. But wait, the anecdote gets even better, as it has a twist:

“Often it would rain shortly after these prayers. Why? Because the priests had privately spoken to meteorologists who told them a wet spell was on the way.”

Asked to go deeper to the root cause of this inaction, the commentator thinks that all governments in Cyprus pretty much behave in the same way – one copies the other, a ‘don’t rock the boat’ mentality.

As for the population at large, it seems to suffer from the ‘boiling frog syndrome’: people slowly get used to scandals and incompetence, they become inured to it.

“That said, and leaving officialdom aside, the average Cypriot is not entirely without blame. So they’ll complain all day long about corruption and so forth – but at the same time they’ll seek a favour from a minister or government official. It’s certainly contradictory.”

One of the most shocking events lately involved the deaths of a family of five in their Limassol apartment. They burned in their home, after a fire believed to have been started by a new electric heater. That set off an intense debate about the safety standards of electrical appliances, and the lack of controls.

We subsequently learned that faulty electrical appliances have led to the deaths of seven people so far this year, in addition to five in 2023 and four in 2024. In 2025, there have occurred 12 fires due to a short circuit, six due to an electrical device, one from a heater and one from an electric cooking device.

Commenting on this, Marios Droushiotis, head of the Cyprus Consumers Association, homed in on the inadequate checks.

He said the CE (Conformite Europeenne) marking, denoting compliance with EU standards, is all well and good – ditto for the Rapex notification system. But what of the fact that 80 per cent of electrical devices circulating in the market are manufactured outside of the EU?

Droushiotis clarified he was speaking of all devices – appliances such as heaters, but also sockets, adaptors and extensions.

“The first check is carried out by customs when a product enters the country. No checks are done if a product is manufactured in the EU. For non-EU products, these are checked by customs through sampling. Obviously, customs cannot check but a fraction of the items. And from the result, we see that these controls are ineffectual.”

Usually non-EU electrical products (from Asia and China) are imported via EU countries.

“Asian companies have established large warehouses in Europe. One such central warehouse is located in Thessaloniki, Greece. It’s a major supplier of items sold in Cyprus. In Thessaloniki, they get checked by Greek customs on arrival, again with the sampling method. Once cleared from there, they get distributed throughout Europe but without additional checks – because they already passed the first hurdle of having entered into the EU.”

The next stage is checks done by the importers themselves. By law, importers must sell only products that meet EU standards.

The last stage of checks is by the competent authority – in this case the department of electromechanical services. But these are also largely ineffectual.

According to Droushiotis, electrical appliances may be sold if they feature the classic three-pin plug. But they can also be sold with a two-pin plug if accompanied with an adaptor.

“A big problem involves the appliances with fake CE markings. You can usually tell if the CE sticker is fake if it comes off easily. Authentic CE items are more expensive. Importers prefer cheaper products.”

Sub-par products are prone to short-circuiting or causing electrocution.

As a general comment, Droushiotis has this to say: “In Cyprus we don’t have the necessary seriousness, authorities do not do their job. Problems get handled superficially. The root cause is impunity, hardly anyone gets punished.

“Sure, we have admissions after the fact about errors and omissions, but rarely proper accountability. Without this, there’s simply no incentive to get serious. And the state in general displays an inability to impose the required punishment.”