It all started on a Saturday with a report in Politis. It was the front-page story on the purchase of a €600,000 limousine for the Presidency of the Republic, a car that will be used for the movements of President Christodoulides, as well as for transporting visiting heads of state to Cyprus. What reasons justify buying such an expensive car, or buying a new one at all when the previous one was only seven years old, are questions that even ChatGPT throws up its hands at and cannot answer.
The bigger question is the President's own stance. He seems to find political inaccuracy (sic) easy, given that his first reaction was to say he had learned of it from the press and knew nothing about it, even though the report itself referred to a decision of the Council of Ministers. Say, for argument's sake, that he doesn't remember, or that the amount didn't strike him when it was raised at Cabinet: he's only human, he has so much on his mind, a festival to attend for zivania and sympathy, a call with Tufan to make, Turkey to blame. But what about that team of his, with all those fake accounts? Did not a single one of them spot the story and send it to the "How do we respond to a report" group chat, to tell him what to say? He read the front page, not the colleague's actual article, just like your typical social media user who reads something about welfare benefits without knowing what they even are, but scrolls past a spat between Tounis and Mitsotakis and somehow knows every detail. He saw it was in Politis, easy, decided they were attacking the President, and told himself "we've got this": it's not the President's job to browse limousine brochures, of course it's a deliberate leak from Parliament, and let's throw in the little trick about the "toxic atmosphere" around our man of the people. The President (and his team), who so often invests in suspicion of the media, in "leaks," in vested interests, and in supposed attacks against the President, has fallen victim to his own political recipe. He has learned to see a trap everywhere, and the moment he spotted a headline convenient to fight, he rushed to respond before reading what it actually said. That is the ABC of populism, which trains you to react before you're informed, and to treat every criticism as an attack and every unwelcome piece of information as a conspiracy. Until, one day, you find yourself caught in the very trap you had been setting for others.
And how do we fix such a monumental blunder? With a bit of diversion, of course. Suddenly we remembered the security details of former Presidents, former Speakers of Parliament, and former First Ladies. Let's discuss it, of course. It's a serious matter and, it seems, order is finally being brought to a system that had become something of a free-for-all. But how convenient it is for the conversation to shift from the €600,000 and the President's response, to how many police officers one man has versus another. Bread and butter for populism: if you don't like the question, change the subject. And if needed, throw in a few words about the former officials, too. The former office-holders, after all, are much easier to turn into the scapegoat for whatever you don't want to discuss today.
