Well, here we go again. Everyone is shouting that it’s far too early to talk about the presidential election of February 2028, yet it is the one subject the party system is obsessed with.
DISY led the dance. Unlike some, it can’t keep its internal bloodletting and personal agendas under wraps. Other parties may well have started the presidential chatter earlier, but nobody notices them. Which is, in its way, an… advantage.
For now, all eyes are on DISY, where the theatre of the absurd has a long run ahead of it, even if the scenery is slowly falling into place.
Meanwhile, you hear all sorts on the TV panels, and some panellists seem to think this country is suffering from collective amnesia.
Could AKEL back Averof Neofytou? Of course not. And we hardly needed our dear friend Giorgos Loukaides to tell us so. AKEL won’t back him, openly at least, because it would wreck the whole AKEL-versus-DISY story, in which each is the other’s arch-enemy. Appearing on Christos Michalaros’s show on Sigma, Loukaides described the former DISY leader as a “key pillar” of Nicos Anastasiades’s government for ten years “at every level”. He said a few other things too.
But one question hangs in the air, and it will haunt plenty of people: what happened between the first and second rounds of the 2023 presidential election? Who at Pindarou Street, DISY’s headquarters, gave the order to hand the party’s membership lists to AKEL so that DISY voters could be approached to back Andreas Mavroyiannis?
AKEL owes Pindarou one. Just as Annita Demetriou owes Averof Neofytou.
But politics, alas, is thankless and unjust.
At the same time, DISY vice-president Giannis Karousos, discussing the presidential election and the goings-on in the party on the programme ‘Diaspora Eidiseon’, said: “DISY’s opponent is Nikos Christodoulides. He’s the one we’ll be slugging it out with for a place in the second round.” He said this even as his own comrades in the DISY leadership, wringing their hands over the state of the party, warn that the party’s manoeuvring and conduct will put AKEL in power.
That warning, which is less political than emotional, doesn’t move everyone in DISY. A section of the party machine would have no problem with that prospect, of AKEL clambering into power. Ideological and political “enemies” have their uses: there is always a bogeyman. But opponents need to be defined in political terms, not merely wheeled out to rally the troops.
The… carnival at DISY has inevitably pushed the other parties into talking about the presidential election too, which, incidentally, has been simmering for some time. AKEL says its talks are aimed at “programmatic convergence” with a candidate who will also have “progressive characteristics”. In other words, a right-winger with “good references” who can be seen as, or passed off as, progressive! Remember the 1983 minimum programme with DIKO, when AKEL backed Spyros Kyprianou. In 2003, AKEL backed Tassos Papadopoulos.
For the record, AKEL endorsed Papadopoulos before DIKO itself had ratified his candidacy. AKEL’s Pancyprian Electoral Congress met on 27 July 2002 and voted 939 to 36, with 34 abstentions, to back him. On 30 July, DIKO’s Central Committee adopted its Executive Bureau’s proposal for his candidacy. By then, according to DIKO’s announcement, representatives of AKEL, DIKO and KISOS (EDEK) had already drawn up a framework of principles.
