What is going on inside the Democratic Rally (DISY) may be a party matter, and not everyone’s concern. But it bears on the island’s public life, and it comes wrapped in so much play-acting, maddeningly in the service of personal agendas, that this column feels obliged to say its piece. Harris Georgiades has behaved with more dignity than anyone else in everything that has unfolded over the past few days, inside DISY and in public life at large.
Agree with him or not, I say this for a reason. Ever since Averof Neofytou’s strategy (manoeuvring, as plenty of people call it) forced DISY’s official leadership to withdraw party leader Annita Demetriou’s candidacy for the presidential election and, in the end, to beg Neofytou to stand in the internal race, I had been wondering whether anyone in the party still had the dignity to call things by their name. Georgiades did. A little late, perhaps, but he did. And ever since, we have watched a procession of people, none of them as battle-scarred in party politics as he is, line up to scold him in the name of party unity.
Suppose Georgiades had swallowed his objections and then spent the campaign hiding so he would not have to back his own party’s candidate, all to hang on to his post as chairman of the Glafcos Clerides Institute. That would have been hypocritical and undignified, and it would have wounded his party very badly. Invited onto television debates and to rallies, as he inevitably would be, he would have had to dream up excuse after excuse for not turning up. That alone would have done the party and its candidate far more harm.
So he chose to speak now, 16 months before the election. “On grounds of principle”, he said, he could never accept “a fait accompli which I believe was shaped under conditions of pressure and blatant political blackmail”. As he wrote in his letter to Demetriou, he believes decisions of this kind should have been preceded by “a sober political process, through which the party’s strategy would be drawn up and its options assessed”. Instead, he charges, “tactical game-playing, backroom manoeuvring and unbridled ambition prevailed”.
When he talks of blackmail and games, he means this: Neofytou kept the threat of an independent candidacy dangling “until the last moment”, and with it the prospect of a serious split in the party. Who missed that? Who failed to see the blackmail for what it was? Whether or not Neofytou went down that road because he was taken for a ride at a fish tavern, the fact remains that the whole party swallowed the blackmail, held its tongue and gave the games free rein. That is not the stature of the country’s largest party.
Once Georgiades saw his colleagues pretending they had seen nothing, heard nothing and understood nothing of what the whole of Cyprus had seen, there was only one thing left for him to do: protect his own political dignity.
Now he is being given lessons in party etiquette, with deputy leader Yiannis Karousos first in the queue. The gist is that Georgiades should have swallowed the blackmail like everyone else and backed whoever the members choose. What really bothers them, I suspect, is this: his stand exposes everyone who kept quiet.
That is play-acting, not politics. It is the same play-acting we saw in 2023, between the first and second rounds, when the party officially declared a conscience vote and then canvassed its own members for AKEL’s candidate.
They have been hunting for the mistake ever since. They still have not grasped that beyond personal agendas, vendettas, obsessions and inconsistency, there is such a thing as political dignity, credibility, principle and, yes, a “sober political process”. That is what should be driving their politics.
