Jack Ewing

<h1>Dimitris Christofias, a Communist whose disastrous term as president of Cyprus was marked by financial crisis, dashed hopes of reconciling the divided island, and a freak explosion that knocked out the country’s main power supply, died on Friday in Nicosia. He was 72.</h1>

His death was announced by the Progressive Party of the Working People, the Cypriot Marxist party known in Greek as AKEL that had been Christofias’ political home for most of his life. He had been suffering from a severe lung ailment, according to health officials quoted by the English-language Cyprus Mail.

Christofias was an oddity in European politics, a Soviet-trained Communist who oversaw a nation that belongs to the eurozone and has a free-market economy. Cyprus is a major offshore financial center serving international corporations and wealthy people attracted by low taxes.

His election as president in 2008 was perhaps less surprising to residents of Cyprus, a nation of 1.2 million where unorthodox politics are the norm. Though a member of the European Union, Cyprus is much closer to Beirut than to Brussels, and has a large Russian expatriate population and cordial relations with the Kremlin.

Despite his orthodox Communist ideology, Christofias won over Cypriots with promises to reunify the Greek and Turkish sectors of the island, which have been separated since a 1974 war. A U.N. peacekeeping force still patrols the demarcation line.

But talks between Christofias and his Turkish counterpart stalled, and any optimism about reunification was overshadowed by a series of disasters that he was blamed for mismanaging.

Beginning in 2010, the Cypriot economy was overwhelmed by the severe debt crisis in Greece, where Cypriot banks had invested heavily. The second-largest bank in Cyprus failed, unemployment soared, and many Cypriots were unable to pay their mortgages. Until recently, more than half of the outstanding loans in Cyprus were considered nonperforming.

The incident that most damaged Christofias politically came in 2011. Dozens of containers of gunpowder and other munitions, which had been confiscated en route from Iran to Syria and stored next to a Cypriot naval base, exploded. The blast killed 13 people, including the Cyprus Navy’s top commander, devastated the base and knocked out the island’s main power plant, causing chronic power shortages.

Christofias was blamed for ignoring warnings that the munitions, which had been sitting outdoors in the Mediterranean heat for two years, could become unstable.

As president, Christofias made significant progress toward reunifying the island, said Stavros A. Zenios, a professor at the University of Cyprus. “Unfortunately, he was not equipped to deal with other major crises that hit Cyprus on his watch,” Zenios said. “He was an unlucky politician, rising much above the level of his competence at the wrong time.”

Christofias was born to a working class family on Aug. 29, 1946, in Kyrenia, a province now part of the Turkish section of Cyprus. He became involved with left-wing politics as a youth, and from 1969 to 1974 studied history at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow, where he earned a doctorate, according to the AKEL party website.

Returning to Cyprus, he rose steadily through the ranks of the local Communist Party, becoming secretary general in 1988. In 2008, he scored one-third of the vote in an initial round of the presidential election and a majority in a runoff to become Cyprus’ first Communist leader. Polls at the time showed him to be Cyprus’ most popular politician, given the best chance of achieving reconciliation because of ideological ties to his Turkish counterpart. Despite his strident Marxist rhetoric, Christofias left Cyprus’ free market economy largely intact.

But by the time his term expired in February 2013, Christofias had become one of the most unpopular Cypriot leaders ever, and he declined to seek reelection. He was succeeded as president by Nicos Anastasiades, a political conservative.

Christofias is survived by his wife, Elsie; his daughters, Marianna and Christina; and a son, Christos, according to numerous sources. The government of Cyprus declared a period of mourning through Tuesday, when Christofias will receive a state funeral.

Although Cristofias’ political power faded after he left office, his son, Christos, has pursued a political career and remained true to his father’s Marxist principles. In a speech prepared for the AKEL party’s congress in January, the younger Cristofias, head of the party’s youth wing, addressed the audience as “comrades,” railed against the “scourge” of global capital, and cited socialist Cuba as an inspiration.

“The tools given to us by the classics of our ideology, namely Marxism-Leninism,” Christos Christofias said, according to the party’s website, “help us to understand how and why our societies are being driven from bad to worse.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/obituaries/dimitris-christofias-is-dead.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Dimitris Christofias, 72, Cyprus president for one ill-fated term, dies

His death was announced by the Progressive Party of the Working People, the Cypriot Marxist party known in Greek as AKEL that had been Christofias’ political home for most of his life.

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Jack Ewing

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Dimitris Christofias, 72, Cyprus president for one ill-fated term, dies