Dimitris Christofias: The Communist Who Ran a Eurozone Economy
"I will leave truly miserable," Dimitris Christofias said as his term ran out, "because what I had promised can't happen given Turkey's intransigence." He had come to office in 2008 as the man best placed in a generation to reunify Cyprus — a Greek Cypriot communist with real relationships among Turkish Cypriot trade unionists, elected precisely so that he could try. Five years later the island was still divided, thirteen sailors were dead, and the banks were gone.
The Builder's Son from Dikomo
He was born on 29 August 1946 at Dikomo, the son of a builder and one of five children. He was educated in the Soviet Union, which in the Cypriot left of that era was the ordinary route for a bright working-class boy with a party card, and he returned an unshakeable Marxist.
The formative event was the catastrophe of 1974, when the Turkish invasion left the island partitioned. Christofias, then leading EDON, the communist youth movement, was described by comrades as always at the forefront of the struggles that followed. From that point the Cyprus problem was the organising fact of his life, and reunification, as he put it, his life's vision.
AKEL
AKEL — the Progressive Party of the Working People — is unlike most communist parties in Europe: mass-based, rooted in the trade unions, and unusual in the region for maintaining working relationships with the Turkish Cypriot left across the dividing line. In April 1988, at forty-one, Christofias became its youngest-ever general secretary, a post he held until 2009.
He was an internationalist by conviction rather than protocol, visiting Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro in 1990. Colleagues who eulogised him used the same two words repeatedly: simple and forthright. From June 2001 to February 2008 he served as President of the House of Representatives, the second office of the state, and by the end of that period he was the most plausible left candidate the republic had produced.
He also came close to not surviving it. In 1999 he received a kidney transplanted from his sister and underwent open-heart surgery in the same year.
The Opening of Ledra Street
He won the presidency in early 2008, and the international reaction was close to hopeful. Here at last was a Greek Cypriot leader with genuine standing among the Turkish Cypriot left, facing a Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, who came from the same political tradition. Observers judged that he had the best chance in decades of a breakthrough.
The first result came quickly. Christofias and Talat agreed to open a crossing at Ledra Street in the heart of divided Nicosia — a shopping street that had come, for many, to stand for the partition of the island itself. It was a small physical act with an outsized symbolic charge, and for a moment it looked like the beginning of something.
It was not. The talks ran on without resolution. In April 2010 Talat was defeated and replaced by Derviş Eroğlu, who favoured independence for the north but agreed to keep negotiating. Five years of meetings produced no settlement.
Mari
On 11 July 2011, a cache of some four hundred tonnes of munitions seized from an Iranian shipment and stored in the open at the Evangelos Florakis Naval Base spontaneously combusted. Thirteen people were killed. The blast destroyed the island's main power station.
An official inquiry found Christofias personally responsible. He rejected the finding absolutely, said his subordinates had misled him, insisted "I'm easy with my conscience," and described the campaign against him as a war of extermination. Whatever the truth of the chain of command, the political effect was terminal: a president who had been elected on trust was now the man who had failed to notice a bomb sitting in a field.
The Bailout
The explosion arrived on top of a banking system already fatally exposed to Greek debt, and it took out the electricity supply of a country running on tourism. Christofias fell into an open feud with the central bank governor, Athanasios Orphanides, over who was to blame. A subsequent inquiry held him primarily responsible for bringing the republic close to bankruptcy, citing reckless economic policy and the delay in opening bailout negotiations. He called that inquiry illegal and its report fraught with untruths and slander.
His approval ratings sank to among the lowest recorded for any Cypriot president. He became the only holder of the office who chose not to seek a second term. The 2013 election was fought over the bailout rather than reunification, and Nicos Anastasiades won it on a promise to secure EU and IMF money fast.
Why Dimitris Is Called a Genius
No source consulted here uses the word. His own party calls him an inspirer, and a man who was simple and forthright — a description that is affectionate precisely because it is not a claim to brilliance.
The defensible claim is about a single strategic insight, held consistently for four decades. Christofias understood the Cyprus problem structurally rather than nationally: not as a quarrel between two peoples but as a quarrel between two nationalist elites, over the heads of a population with shared material interests. That is why AKEL kept lines open to Turkish Cypriot unions across the dividing line, and it is why, when he reached the presidency, he had something no predecessor had — real personal trust on the other side of the Green Line. Ledra Street opened because two men from the same political culture could agree on something in an afternoon.
The counter-case is severe and largely conceded. The insight did not survive contact with Ankara, and five years of talks yielded nothing. He was found personally responsible for a munitions disaster that killed thirteen people, and primarily responsible for economic mismanagement that helped push his country to the edge of bankruptcy — findings he angrily rejected but did not disprove. A lifelong Marxist proved poorly equipped to steer a small, over-banked, free-market eurozone economy through a continental credit crisis; that mismatch, more than any scandal, defines his term. He was a man of unusual moral consistency and, on the evidence, ordinary executive capacity.
Legacy
Christofias died in Nicosia on 21 June 2019, aged seventy-two. He is remembered by his own movement as an idealist and an internationalist, and by much of the Cypriot public as the president under whom everything went wrong at once. Both are accurate. The crossing at Ledra Street is still open, which is a modest monument, and the argument he spent his life making — that the island's division serves elites rather than either community — has outlived the disappointment of his presidency.
Achievements
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Pius IX — 2010
- Educated at Russian Academy of Sciences and Institute of Social Sciences of the CC of the CPSU
- Worked as politician
