With only a week to go before the parliamentary elections, the public apathy we wrote about last month remains at the same levels it was then. No matter how hard the political parties try to up the ante, people remain underwhelmed. There is just no interest in what the parties or individual candidates are saying, the only ones listening are journalists and party activists, for whom following the campaign is a professional duty.

Veteran parliamentarians who have been through several campaigns have been saying that the public’s indifference to these elections was astonishing and unprecedented. This is supported by the very low viewership ratings of election shows on television, which attract a tiny fraction of the viewers who tune in to watch the popular, local soap operas. People seem to be talking more, and having a laugh, about the silly slogans used by candidates on their giant posters, than about political issues.

It is not as if there is nothing to discuss. While everybody, quite understandably, is suffering from Cyprus problem fatigue and automatically switches off when the politicians are muttering their vacuous rhetoric, why is there no interest in the issue of the economy, which affects us all? Perhaps most people are not bothered about the downgrades of the economy and the precarious state of public finances, which they think do not affect them, but what about the high-interest rates they are paying, the high unemployment rate and the constantly rising cost of living?

These are matters that have an effect on our daily lives, but nobody is talking about them. Even the politicians who, until a few weeks ago, were slamming the government’s failure to tackle the structural problems of the economy have toned down their rhetoric, presumably, so they would not alienate public sector voters who are a sizeable section of the electorate. The idiotic accusations that they are defenders of wealth and privilege by AKEL, which poses as the guardians of the workers, have had the desired result for the government.

Suddenly nobody is talking about the ticking time-bomb that is the state pension system or the need to reduce to the public sector wage bill. The main opposition party DISY is talking about alleged nepotism in the police instead of making the economy the only issue and constantly repeating the threats posed to everyone’s standard of living, including civil servants, by the government’s unwillingness to take tough decisions. The voters need to be made aware of the dangerous path the government has been following and the election campaign was the best opportunity to do this.

Perhaps the election consultants have advised the parties against making too much out of our economic woes because doom and gloom campaigning does not win votes. Voters would rather be told what they want to hear rather than be reminded of unpleasant truths and the need for unpopular decisions in the near future. There is also the possibility that no matter what the candidates and the parties say or promise people would carry on ignoring them.

The prevailing view, repeated by opinion formers and many politicians, is that there is general disillusionment with politics and politicians, as is the trend in most Western countries in the aftermath of the recession. In Cyprus, there is an additional reason for the general apathy. Parliamentary elections in a presidential system are not so important. It would make no real difference to how the country is governed if DISY won two more seats than it had in the last parliament or if AKEL remained the biggest party. The number of seats taken by each party may have a bearing on the next presidential elections, but this is of more interest to the party leadership than voters.

Public apathy could also be related to the length of the election campaign which has been going on for months. The campaign has had the effect of most things that drag on for too long – it has turned people off. This is why the next time there are elections the parties should consider keeping the campaign short – a couple of weeks at most – so it would have some impact. They might even manage to attract the voters’ interest if they drastically cut the length of their campaign.