8 hours Ago
The communications shrewdness that ensured the meteoric rise and election of President Nikos Christodoulides appears not to be working for him since entering the presidential palace. After a short honeymoon period, his popularity and approval ratings have been on a downward path which he has been unable to reverse, as opinion polls indicate. In the latest opinion poll , conducted by Prime Consulting for Sigma to mark two years of the Christodoulides presidency, 65 per cent of respondents said Christodoulides should not be re-elected, with only 17 per cent saying that he should be.
Meanwhile, 69 per cent felt the country was heading in the wrong direction and 19 per cent in the right direction, while three quarters of respondents were not satisfied with the work of the president. He is the third most popular politician after the House president Annita Demetriou, who tops the popularity ratings, and Akel chief Stefanos Stefanou, but his popularity is down seven percentage points compared to February 2024. This could be because 60 per cent of the public believed that he had not fulfilled his election promises.
Interestingly, only on two aspects of his presidency were the largest number of respondents satisfied – foreign policy (51 per cent), which has seen him place Cyprus in the Western sphere of influence and pursue much closer relations with the EU, and migration (49 per cent). But on the Cyprus issue, the economy, education and health more than 50 per cent of respondents were not satisfied. The highest level of dissatisfaction was in the way the government was dealing with criminality, with 78 per cent of people unhappy with anti-crime policies.
Have the president’s excellent communications skills that won him election to the highest office abandoned him, or is it a case that what worked for him when he was foreign minister, with no real responsibilities, is no longer working? Perhaps the excessive exposure is also undermining his standing. He is in the news every day, often for no other reason than making some comment about current affairs on his way into one of the events he attends every day. His ubiquity is obviously not boosting his popularity but having the opposite effect.
People may have grown tired of listening to the president making daily statements, often dictating to people how they should perceive events – ‘historic’ visits, ‘emblematic’ policies, ‘very significant’ developments and so forth. He is putting himself at the judgment of people every day by insisting he remains at the top of the news. Even the habit of having interest groups at the presidential palace to solve their problems and disputes, which sees him posing as the wise mediator, has worked against him because he does not have the answers for everything.
The idea that the president is blessed with huge quantities of wisdom, capable of solving every problem faced by the country, which Christodoulides seems to embrace, is from another era. It may have worked in the time of Makarios but it has no place in 2025 because people have changed. When the president recognises this he may also be able to improve his poor approval ratings.
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