KETI CLERIDES: IN LIEU OF AN OBITUARY
If you truly want to honour the memory of Keti Clerides and understand who Glafcos’s only daughter really was, ignore the carbon-copy, wooden, AI-generated bollocks that (mostly) DISY lot have been posting and spouting all day, and watch her appearance on Christoforos Christofi’s Legal Matters podcast again. Because in recent years, as Keti Clerides watched the Anastasiades government slide into the cesspit of corruption and DISY lurch to the hard right, she wasn’t just talking. She was eviscerating them.
But who was listening to her, really? Nobody. In the final years of her life, Keti had been discredited and politically isolated by the party her father founded, by the party that birthed and raised her—because she didn’t mince her words, she called things exactly as she saw them, and she called them with brutal force. About the Anastasiades government, the corruption, the enrichment, DISY’s tolerance of it all, the party’s abandonment of her father’s core principles and values—despite the fact that they still suck on them like sweets.
“If my father were alive today, he’d be more lenient than I am. I feel very strongly against Anastasiades, because I believe he should have continued Clerides’s path. He gave every sign he was heading that way, but he betrayed every single one of Clerides’s principles. Both on the Cyprus issue and on Clerides’s philosophy—that you enter politics to serve, not to get rich,” she told Christoforos, adding, when commenting on those who invoke Glafcos Clerides’s principles and values, that “this particular term has been abused.”
Keti never had time for DISY’s far-right faction, and she didn’t hide it. “This dualism has been there in DISY from the beginning—that’s DISY’s problem, because I don’t know if today there are any heirs to Clerides’s political line who can lead the party back to where my father took it,” she said. In the 2023 elections, both in a Facebook post and in statements when she accompanied Averof Neophytou to cast his vote, she laid into Nikos Anastasiades mercilessly. “I think Mr Anastasiades’s reputation started being damaged a long time ago. Ours is a small country, we all know things and situations—sometimes when it suits us we hide them, but I think everyone’s life and conduct is an open book in Cyprus. Perhaps we should have had some thoughts earlier about how this man should have been dealt with.” Her remarks provoked Nikaros’s fury—he ranted about “vulgarity,” equated himself with Glafcos Clerides and Keti with his slanderers, and finally, with a reference to Venizelos, called her “a burden” on her father’s name. Not a single DISY member came out to defend her or call the all-powerful President to order for these insulting remarks—not just to Keti but to her family name. Even Averof—who, as she herself revealed to Christofi, had quietly encouraged her to publicly go after Anastasiades because he was backing Christodoulides—did a complete U-turn between the two election Sundays, throwing Keti under the bus and expressing his disagreement with her statement. She herself backed Mavroyiannis in the second round, further enraging the Christodoulides camp, the traditionalist DISY lot, and the hard-right extremists.
That was Keti. Always consistent in her views and her struggles for democracy, equality, justice, and a truly liberal, modern, open, and tolerant DISY—faithful to her father’s fundamental values and ideals. And she paid for it, especially towards the end, when her father had become little more than an almost obsessive-compulsive reference point in formulaic speeches, anniversaries, and memorial services, and she herself had become a political pariah—with many of those weeping and wailing today saying back then that she’d “gone senile,” “lost the plot,” “become a laughingstock,” and so on.
On the last point, they might not be entirely wrong. She said it herself, after all: “To be honest in Cyprus today, you’re a laughingstock.” I don’t know whether Glafcos, from wherever he is watching, is still proud of the party he founded (I rather doubt it), but of his daughter—with whom he was reunited today—undoubtedly. Faithful to him and his political legacy, right to the end.
P.S. Besides Keti, today we also “lost” the former Bishop of Kition Chrysostomos, better known as “Little Cannon,” who was accused of rape and sexual abuse and ultimately convicted to 12 months’ imprisonment with suspension for indecent assault on a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 1981. The girl had gone to his office for help because she’d just lost her father and came from a poor family, and the then all-powerful Bishop pushed her on the sofa and tried to rape her. One of the rare cases where, though I’m an atheist, I hope the Christians are right and there is a hell—so that this particular specimen can burn for eternity. Perhaps that way justice might finally be served, having escaped it on Earth.
This article was first published on 06.10.2025