Cypriots Feel Betrayed by European Union

 

Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times

Charalambos Alexandrou, shown with his wife, Aliki Perganti, had a lucrative job in construction after Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004. Today, he has much less work.

By LIZ ALDERMAN

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Like a lot of Cypriots, Charalambos Alexandrou helped build his country into a modern Mediterranean paradise.

As money flowed into the island’s banks after Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, the country embarked on a construction boom. He landed a lucrative roofing job, at first for sleek homes and shops, and then for the mansions that took over olive groves and vineyards. The demand for his skills only accelerated after the country was admitted into the euro currency union in 2008.

But in the last two weeks, he has watched his finances slide as the foundations of his country crumble during the collapse of the banking system. The severe terms of the country’s 10 billion euro ($13 billion) international bailout have tied up everyone’s cash, forced huge losses on the strictest savers and are expected to hasten a deep recession that may take years to overcome.

Mr. Alexandrou, 30, says he understands that the crisis in Cyprus was brought on by bank mismanagement and even financial corruption.

What most pains him and many others here, though, is that central bankers and other international financial officials have, by letting their country’s 860,000 citizens suffer for the sins of a powerful few, shattered Cyprus’s solidarity with the European Union.

Cyprus is no poor cousin to the European Union, they say. Instead, it is a country with a small, but remarkably multilingual, solidly educated and until now comfortably middle-class population — people who consider themselves precisely the type of Europeans the rest of the union should be proud to have anchor its border with the Middle East.

Many Cypriots now feel great shock and anger at what they consider their economic excommunication.

“Not everyone here is Russian, or making money illegally, or laundering money,” Mr. Alexandrou said. “Most of us are normal people living normal lives.”

He sat, face grim, with his wife, Aliki, and their energetic 18-month-old son, Alexandros, in the living room of their modern white house on the outskirts of Nicosia. “Now we see that nothing good has come from European solidarity,” he said.

For Cypriots, joining the European Union and adopting the euro were significant achievements. After decades of internal strife and foreign occupation, Cyprus regarded acceptance into the European family as a promise of stability and the chance to forge a more modern economy.

During the boom times, Mr. Alexandrou acknowledged, Cyprus, like many European countries, lived beyond its means. But while it is time for the country to pay for its follies, he said, “there is the sense that no one in Europe really cares what happens to us.”

Some of his fellow Cypriots have vented their resentment in protests, shouting anti-German epithets and burning the European Union flag. Cypriots are relatively stoic compared with their more fiery brethren in bailed-out Greece, but there is deep-seated anger over the perception that Europe is kicking Cyprus while it is down.

“We made sacrifices to integrate Cyprus into the great European family,” Antigoni Papadopoulou, a member of Parliament, said last week as Cyprus tried to negotiate its bailout. But “there is a real lack of European solidarity,” she said.

With encouragement and subsidies from Brussels, Cyprus moved away from an agricultural economy toward an emphasis on services that support business, finance and communications. Manufacturing was also allowed to lapse, with locally made goods — whether shoes or pharmaceuticals — all but disappearing.

Cyprus’s leaders seized the opportunity to recast the island as a strategic hub at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Their ambition was to emulate the wealthy, discreet European money havens of Luxembourg and Switzerland, thus securing a comfortable way of life for their people.

 

A version of this article appeared in print on April 2, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cypriots Feel Betrayed by European Union.

Posted in: World business