According to a report published by Politis, the EU’s Special Representative for the Cyprus issue, Johannes Hahn, is stepping back from his efforts. The former Austrian commissioner has identified a lack of any meaningful developments, as well as an absence of willingness on the part of the sides to produce results.
Although his appointment had been presented as an achievement of the mobility sought by the Greek Cypriot side, with President Nikos Christodoulides referring to the “added value” of the appointment and the interest of the EU, Hahn appears to have concluded that no one is prepared to move the process forward. He had, in any case, sent an early message that what is needed are initiatives rather than wishful thinking. This is something that, judging also by the latest meeting between Christodoulides and the UN Secretary-General, does not appear to have been taken into account.
The President argued that it was confirmed there is a shared objective for meaningful progress on the Cyprus issue. A very different reading can be drawn, however, from the statement issued by the Secretary-General’s office, which limited itself to noting that the meeting with Nikos Christodoulides included a discussion on the next steps in the issue. In essence, this is a formulation identical in content to the one used when António Guterres met Tufan Erhürman in New York a month earlier. These are, in effect, standard references that reflect the complete stagnation of the problem, or the absence of developments in the way the Secretary-General himself would wish.
Neither meeting demonstrated that there are serious preconditions for continuing efforts on the Cyprus issue, as there is currently nothing substantive on the table. This is despite the President’s repeated and increasingly insistent statements, including those made in Brussels, that the Secretary-General “shares the same view” regarding the need for meaningful progress before the end of his term.
In reality, however, the need to internalise the next steps was highlighted by the Secretary-General’s envoy, María Ángela Holguín, who referred to moves on the Cyprus issue that should be reflected in confidence-building measures and stressed that “without this framework it is very difficult for any substantive discussion to take place through the convening of an expanded conference on the issue”.
Holguín made this clear and has since stepped back until further notice. She has fully understood that declaratory statements do not create the conditions for meaningful dialogue. After all, everything has already been recorded in the convergences of the previous effort in 2017.