Tomorrow Cypriots will go to the polls to cast their vote for the EU Elections. A main goal of the mod team was to encourage the people of r/Cyprusyoung people, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to get interested in these elections, ask their questions to the candidates, choose who to vote for based on their beliefs and positions. In this context we decided to host the Ask Me Anything Event and invite two candidates per party as we did.
Before getting into the info about the AMA I want to kindly ask you to fill the form AMA EU Elections 2024 – Evaluation Form to give us feedback about the AMA Event.
And now let’s talk about the AMA. We invited candidates from all the parliamentary parties. There was a disagreement within the mod team regarding inviting ELAM but the majority decided we could invite them and we did. We tried contacting them by email, by the ELAM office, by using their personal mobile phones. But we never got a reply. We also tried (repeatedly, for every platform) to invite Feidias but we never got any answer from him. For the rest of the candidates I have to say that to my and our surprise they were all very positive to doing AMA. Their main worry was about time and once we explained how it works all of them accepted. The choice of the candidates was decide by an internal voting of the mod team and volunteers. We would like you to know that this whole thing took us a looot of time. Yes it did, you may not believe it but it required a lot of effort from all of us. We want to thank all the candidates that accepted our invitations, all the people that helped us promote the event(we will make posts with the content in the following days), all the users that asked constructive questions and participated in the event while be respectful and ofc my personal thanks to the AMA team that worked for this.
I want to ask you to use this post for the following:
1. Mention a candidate whose answers you appreciated the most(or more than one)
2. Tell us your feedback about the AMA(you can ofc use the google form to do this -more- anonymously)
3. If you want, tell us who you plan to vote and your reasons why. I think a lot of people would be interested in that (if you haven’t decided yet feel free to share your concerns)
PS: Here is some gossip my teammates insisted on posting (:
Small A.M.A. gossip
- One candidate rambled about their political opinions while we were trying to explain stuff like date, photo etc.
- One candidate asked one of us if a family member whould vote for them because they noticed a familiar last name.
- One candidate became friends with one of the A.M.A. volunteers.
- One candidate asked if we are "United Cyprus Now!" (we are not)
- One candidate loved the idea very much and offered to help with promotion, then they ghosted us for a week.
- One volunteer now has a crush on one of the candidates. Poems and everything.
- Y’all already know that Elam got officially invited, we called the candidates and the party directly, but no response. That’s not the same as "No" as a response. They literally never said anything to us.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cyprus/comments/1db9bcd/ama_eu_elections_2024_conclusion_evaluation_form/
Posted by Bran37
4 Comments
No specific opinion but thank you so much for organizing all of this! It offered a very real and fascinating insight into Cyprus politics. A lot of my views were challenged and changed as a result of AMAs — that’s a good thing!
>1. Mention a candidate whose answers you appreciated the most(or more than one)
Kind of unfair given that most candidates seemed to either skip most questions or miss the point of an AMA session entirely, but my pick would be Oz Karahan.
I’ll try my hand at guessing the gossip bullet points (someone may or may not confirm them for me):
>1. One candidate rambled about their political opinions while we were trying to explain stuff like date, photo etc.
Oz Karahan.
>3. One candidate became friends with one of the A.M.A. volunteers.
Hulusi Kilim with CypriotPeacemaker.
>4. One candidate asked if we are “United Cyprus Now!” (we are not)
Andromachi Sophocleous.
>5. One candidate loved the idea very much and offered to help with promotion, then they ghosted us for a week.
Maria Kola.
>6. One volunteer now has a crush on one of the candidates. Poems and everything.
Golifa with Eleni Theocharous, obviously.
From the Greek Cypriots it was Eleni Theocharous, also because I didn’t expect it. Just as somebody else noticed; her opinions do not match with mine, but she is a real intellectual. As for the Turkish Cypriots; Oz Karahan is a big disappointment the way he is much too much dogmatic and unfortunately avoided the critical question about his own origins. Hulusi Kilim was the best, but may be I’m biased because I also met him in person a few days after the AMA. Niyazi Kizilyürek was better than I thought; I expected him more talk like a politician given that he is in the circus for the last years. He adressed all questions properly without talking around the bush much.
As for public feedback:
We need a policy regarding people who are answering questions that are actually intended for the candidates. I have the impression that many candidates thought those questions are answered anyways and for that reason did not bother to answer themselves.
I want to hear the opinion of the candidate, not the opinion of a random redditor.
The AMA is not a place for general discussions, at least not before or during the time that candidates are answering. If you got triggered by one of the questions, keep your contribution for the time after the candidates are gone. Or, even better, open a separate post in the sub.