Edek remains in govt after extraordinary party meeting, leader to demand meeting with Christodoulides

Edek will remain in the government following an extraordinary meeting of the party’s political bureau held in light of a cabinet reshuffle which the party had earlier said showed a “lack of respect” for Edek on the part of President Nikos Christodoulides.

“The members of Edek’s political bureau, which met in an extraordinary meeting, exchanged views on the issue of Edek’s relationship with the government, following the recent cabinet reshuffle,” the party announced following the meeting.

It added that its political bureau had “authorised party leader Nikos Anastasiou to arrange a meeting with [Christodoulides] on the subject of re-evaluating Edek’s relationship with the government”, but that the evaluation in question would not impact Edek’s “numerical participation in the government”.

As such, Edek remains a government-supporting party for now, and Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou, the party’s only minister, will remain in post.

Anastasiou had on Saturday ruled out the prospect of his party withdrawing its support for the government after his party had hours earlier released a statement expressing fury over the reshuffle.

“We expected that the president … would see Edek in a better light,” he said on the sidelines of an event in Limassol.

He added that the matter of the reshuffle will be discussed at an extraordinary meeting of the party’s political bureau on Sunday but stressed that “the issue of leaving Nikos Christodoulides’ government, which we have supported with a party conference decision, was never raised”.

In relatively recent memory, Edek has supported and then withdrawn from the governments of both Glafcos Clerides and Demetris Christofias, and rumours of a similar withdrawal began to abound after the party released a scathing statement in reaction to Friday’s cabinet reshuffle.

The party said the six changes made to the makeup of the government caused “strong dissatisfaction” inside the party.

“Edek’s sincere efforts so far to contribute with proposals and positions to the success of the government’s work and its selfless behaviour seem to have not been appreciated,” the party said, before adding that “the rudimentary information shows a lack of respect for Edek.”

The party began and ended the reshuffle in control of exactly one ministerial position – that of Panayiotou – and had hoped to be awarded another ministry.

In advance of the reshuffle, it had been reported that Panayiotou may lose her job after having made comments deemed insensitive in the midst of a wildfire which tore through the Limassol district in July and killed two people.

She said of the fire that “the only way we could have prevented [it] was for it not to have started”, though she was not the only sitting minister to raise eyebrows with their comments mid-fire, as outgoing justice minister Marios Hartsiotis said that “we had absolutely no loss of life” in the wildfire, except for the two people who did die.

Hartsiotis, officially not aligned to a political party, was demoted from the justice ministry to the role of “commissioner of the presidency”.