Next time we hear about the right to vote, we should think of the 2026 US midterms. The American electorate chose to give its answer at the ballot box itself, not on the streets or through unrest.

According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, around 124 million people voted, a record for a midterm election. The preliminary estimate puts turnout at 49.4 per cent of eligible voters, up from 46.1 per cent in 2022.

Americans chose to show up rather than stay at home. They grasped that by abstaining they were simply handing others the right to decide for them. And protest carries far more weight when it is cast at the ballot box than anywhere else, let alone on so-called social media.

Whatever faults you might find in it, the American system is built to correct itself. That is down to the Founding Fathers. They did not believe that those in power would always be virtuous, so they designed a system that does not depend on their virtue.

James Madison spelt it out in Federalist No. 51, in 1788: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” That became what we know as checks and balances. Power is divided so that no one can grab all of it.

The midterms are one of the key cogs in that machinery. Halfway through a presidential term, two years after the President’s election, the American people are asked to pass judgment on him without voting on him directly, giving or taking away the legislative support he needs.

The American system does not stop excess before it happens, which is how you end up with presidents of the Donald Trump variety. But the same system can punish after the fact, and it will not tolerate a permanent concentration of power, whoever is chasing it.

But correction is not a cure, and it has its limits.

The first is time. A correction always comes after the damage is done. Whatever has been done over the past two years to the institutions, the courts and foreign policy cannot be undone at the ballot box. The war with Iran has not ended, and its consequences will still be with us after 2028.

The second is the circumstances. The system was tested in fair weather, with a result that left no room for dispute. The real test would have been a knife-edge contest, and that never came.

The third is the nature of the vote. Bernie Sanders himself admitted that the Democrats “are not very popular”, despite their win. Voters were punishing high prices and the war with Iran. They were not handing the opposition a blank cheque.

The fourth is the veto. The President has already vowed to block the new Congress’s agenda. The likeliest outcome is gridlock, not a change of course.

So voters have set things straight. But the cracks that showed before the vote are still there.

What is the lesson for us, and for Europe?

Institutions hold when citizens use them. Staying at home is not a protest. It is walking away from the only tool that corrects without violence.

Democracy on its own does not guarantee that we will be governed well. It guarantees that those who govern badly will not govern for ever.

His exact words: “If, God forbid, the weekend brings nothing but doom, gloom and deadlock, and not a leaf stirs, Averof will be a candidate.” But he said that on 23 September, and it was never going to hold for ever. Not a leaf stirred then. Now the leaves can whirl into a tornado for all the difference it makes. The decision has been made.

The real story is how our party gatekeepers have managed, a year and a half before the presidential election, to get everyone obsessing about it. There is some movement now, and it could lead somewhere (could, mind you), yet everyone is still glued to the presidential race. We should be fixed on the Cyprus problem and where it might go, alert enough to grab whatever opportunity comes along or to brace for whatever danger. Instead, our first thought is: what will Averof do? That is how thoroughly the party bosses have got us hooked.

Has anyone noticed that in public debate the Cyprus problem has been reduced to a parenthesis? Quite literally. They mumble half a sentence (the usual hot air about how “we must not miss the opportunity” and “the Cyprus problem is our priority”, that sort of thing), then it’s straight back to the juicy stuff: the likely candidates, the backroom manoeuvring, the alliances in the making. Even the President, who is handling the Cyprus problem and insists it is far too early to talk about the presidential election and that he has not decided whether to run in 2028, is churning out announcements at an ever faster clip. He hasn’t launched an election campaign as a candidate. He has launched a campaign (not an election campaign, naturally?) as President.

The two big parties, meanwhile, have thrown themselves into the race, even if neither has officially fired the starting gun: DISY with its internal elections and everything before them that rattled its faithful, AKEL with its hunt for an “electable candidate” who will be legally watertight against Christodoulides. And against Anastasiades too, no doubt.

Now there is talk of a package of confidence-building measures to be agreed, which means opening crossing points. Who is going to look at that without weighing it on the electoral scales? Take Kokkina. The Greek Cypriot side wanted a crossing there, so that the people of Tillyria could at long last have a way through after sixty-odd years of isolation. Then, out of nowhere, the package offers a Kambos-Karavostasi crossing instead. By what logic this is meant to stand in for the Kokkina demand is anyone’s guess. Where exactly would anyone set out from to reach Karavostasi by way of Kambos? Nowhere.

But who cares? Perhaps Averof, who hails from those parts, could explain it to us? Then again, if movement is an end in itself, however pointless, no explanation is needed. It’s all inexplicable anyway.

PS. The old Cypriot saying “another one for Karavostasi” fell out of use after the invasion, because Karavostasi, near Xeros (pictured: the jetty), now lies in the occupied north. I asked AI what it meant and it came out with some barmy stuff. It is “used figuratively”, it told me, “to suggest that someone has lost their mind, is behaving madly or bizarrely, or that a situation has spun completely out of control into utter chaos” (…) “It is the Cypriot equivalent of the mainland Greek ‘We’re all off to Dafni!’ or ‘Lock us all up!’” Can that be right? Not a chance.

President Nikos Christodoulides and Ankara’s placeman in the occupied north, Tufan Erhurman, met on Tuesday, clearly aware that time is running out. They meet again on Monday. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is also there. His presence could upend things. Or it could change nothing at all.

Fidan’s presence, along with the comings and goings of Maria Angela Holguin, the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy on the Cyprus problem, is stirring optimism, particularly over the opening of new crossing points. That, it seems, is where all sights are set.

The contacts and talks this November will be the last before Antonio Guterres steps down as head of the United Nations. That is a given, and it plainly shapes what happens next.

On Tuesday, Christodoulides and Erhurman also met technical committees, keen to send a signal. They saw two of them, on youth and on cultural heritage, followed by the Civil Society Advisory Body. Such meetings are useful, certainly.

But what really matters is that the technical committees, not just these two but all of them, are geared towards undoing the realities created by the occupation. It has long been our position that a Cyprus settlement will not come through normalising the occupation, but through overturning it.

That goal serves every Cypriot. The entire population. Because how can any agreement be called a solution if it does not free the country from what the occupation has left behind?

The process will go on. Nicosia wants it to, and everything it does confirms as much. What we have yet to see is something concrete from Erhurman, and above all from Fidan. To be precise, the proof has to come from Turkey, the occupying power. After all, it is Turkey that will decide whether this push moves forward and covers the last mile.

That is because Donald Trump’s erratic way of seeing politics and reality was becoming fashionable, and Trumpism was hardening into a doctrine. It is a doctrine that has found fertile ground in many other countries, Cyprus included.

Trumpism is, of course, a political syndrome, inseparable from grandiosity and the cult of personality. His party suffered a resounding defeat, yet he believes it was down not to his policy choices but to the fact that… he was not on the ballot himself.

That reading captures a view of politics now shared by quite a few politicians. It may be a symptom of a society turning its back on politics. Or, conversely, it may be a consequence of ideological and political identities weakening and collapsing. Either way, it is tied to the parties’ failure to meet citizens’ expectations, and to society’s disillusionment with parties and politicians.

This is a political philosophy that treats politics and the exercise of executive power as running a business, and that begins and ends with slogans. It is a logic that teeters on the edge of the absurd and the unrealistic. It thrives in the gap that has opened between politics and the citizen: on one side, a politically disengaged society; on the other, a political system in a permanent crisis of credibility.

We do not know whether the election result marks the end of this cycle in the US. What is certain is that it sends strong political messages, not only about the country’s own political landscape but about developments internationally. The American vote does not necessarily reward the Democrats’ policies.

It is, however, a clear rebuke of Republican policies as pursued by the Trump administration. That is the message from the ballot box, however the American President chooses to read it.

So why did they do it?

According to the first political analyses published by US and international media, including Reuters, the Associated Press and the Washington Post, Americans’ voting behaviour appears to have been shaped by a number of factors.

The first is the cost of living. A large part of American society used its vote to register its discontent over the high prices of consumer goods and energy, which weigh on households every day.

The second is tariffs. Presented as a way to protect the American economy, they risked achieving the opposite of what was intended. Rather than working solely in favour of domestic production, tariffs may pass part of the cost on to consumers, deepening fears of further price rises.

The third is the war in Iran and wider US foreign policy in the Middle East. Developments in the region are deepening uncertainty, with possible consequences both for international security and for the American economy.

Beyond these factors, the analyses also point to other elements. Among them are lower turnout among younger voters and part of the traditional voter base, and the Republicans’ excessive identification with the President’s personality.

He argues that his party lost because he was not the candidate. Analysts, meanwhile, note that it may have been precisely this identification that contributed to his electoral failure.

So the real question is not only whether Trump lost, but whether the political logic he stands for has been defeated. That logic is the belief that politics can be conducted through slogans, personal displays of power and promises with too little to show for them in people’s everyday lives. The message is not for the US alone but for the whole Western world.

Yet today’s Serbia cannot be understood apart from its traumatic past. The break-up of Yugoslavia, the nationalisms, the wars of the 1990s, the tragedy of Srebrenica and the NATO bombing of 1999 left deep scars on society. Then came international isolation, political disappointment and a painful transition to an economy that did not keep its promises to everyone. The fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 raised hopes of democratic renewal, but it did not secure a lasting break with patronage politics and the concentration of power.

That unfinished business was dragged back into the spotlight by the Novi Sad disaster on 1 November 2024, when a canopy collapsed at the railway station and killed 16 people. Anger over who was to blame, and over corruption, turned into an unprecedented student movement that swept across the country and brought people together across traditional party lines.

Its strength lay not only in its numbers but in its form. There were the assemblies, the silent protests and the marches of hundreds of kilometres. There was the insistence on non-violence and the solidarity of local communities. Collective protest became an everyday practice of democracy, not just a slogan.

Perhaps this is where the deeper political meaning of the victory lies. In a Europe where disillusionment so often feeds cynicism and authoritarianism, Serbia’s young people have shown that politics can once again be the business of citizens. ‘Vostani Serbije’, or ‘Arise, Serbia’, the historic song of the uprising against Ottoman rule, takes on a new meaning. It is no longer a call to retreat behind national walls, but a demand for dignity and self-determination.

A change of government, of course, is not automatically a change of system. Corruption, judicial independence, media freedom and the country’s European path remain critical tests. Neither the relationship with Russia nor the Balkans’ tangled problems will be solved overnight. That holds even though the Student List’s central idea could not be clearer: a commitment to European values and to the country’s independence.

But Serbia has opened a road worth watching. It does not offer ready-made recipes for other countries. What it offers is a reminder that even in societies scarred by history, collective action can overturn political fatalism. And perhaps the moment really has come for the dreams of an entire generation to take their revenge. Not on a people or an ideology, but on the belief that nothing ever changes.

Here is an extract:

“There is a form of violence that need not injure anyone to count as violence. We see it on our streets every day: slogans, initials, symbols and football club colours daubed on walls, signposts, traffic signs and any public surface going. It is a curious occupation of space by ‘us’, set against ‘them’.

“One might call it a ‘terrorism of ugliness’. Not because every slogan is an act of terrorism in the literal sense, but because there is a mechanism of imposition at work. A message is repeated everywhere, the citizen cannot escape it, and shared space becomes a showcase for one particular identity.

“And now a new slogan has appeared that causes real unease: ‘Schizophrenia 94’. Torn from its clinical meaning, the word ‘schizophrenia’ becomes a rallying cry and a banner. Why would a group of people choose the name of a serious mental disorder to declare who they are? And what does that choice tell us about the individual’s relationship with the group, with the Law, with the other and with public space?

“‘Schizophrenia’ has been stripped of its scientific meaning and pressed into service as a metaphor for the extreme, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable. The word stops describing a mental disorder and becomes a badge of identity. That reveals something about how society sees mental illness. Schizophrenia is no longer presented as a condition that causes a human being pain and calls for treatment and care. It becomes shorthand for ‘We are so extreme that your rules cannot hold us.’ Mental illness becomes a metaphor for rebellion.

“Herein lies a deep social paradox. Just as we are trying to remove the stigma from people with mental disorders, everyday language carries on using diagnoses as insults, labels and symbols of aggression. The person with schizophrenia disappears. All that is left is a caricature of ‘madness’.

“This is not schizophrenia. It is something else. The behaviour may be an expression of fan loyalty, the need to belong, a search for social recognition, aggression, a reaction against authority, social imitation, a need to stand apart, or a mixture of several of these. Psychological analysis has to uncouple the act from the diagnosis and look for its meaning. Perhaps then the ‘Schizophrenia’ slogan will turn out to tell us more about the psychology of the group and its relationship with the Law than about schizophrenia…”

He has no trouble finding the words when accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.” He loses them only when the conversation turns to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

In September, an Iranian American told him that a relative had been chased through the streets by the Revolutionary Guards and asked whether he stood against the mullahs. El-Sayed responded by talking about American imperialism and corporate interests.

“We are dying. Are you with us?” the man pressed. To no avail. It is the familiar routine of the average “progressive”: seize on anything marketed as “Palestine” to parade your “compassion” and enlightened credentials, then see nothing and hear nothing when actual genocides unfold—in Ukraine, for instance—or mass atrocities are committed in Iran and elsewhere. 

Another sip of wine, another conversation with like-minded souls about things only they can “get.”

And perhaps only they can. That, being hardly a compliment.

In a recorded private conference call, he also reportedly explained that he did not want to comment on Ali Khamenei’s death because “a lot of people in Dearborn are sad.” 

He did not explicitly deny saying it.

Israel presents him with no such difficulties. Asked whether it had a right to exist, he replied that it “exists” and dismissed the question as a “gotcha” exercise. 

As for Iron Dome—without which Israel would have been reduced to rubble in the course of a century-long, openly declared campaign of genocide—he said he saw no meaningful distinction between offensive and defensive weapons.

So, a system that intercepts missiles fired by the terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is treated, more or less, as an instrument of aggression. 

He also claims to have condemned Hamas on 7/10 “from day one.” The earliest public condemnation the Investigative Project on Terrorism could find came almost four months after the massacre. On its second anniversary, his campaign sent out a fundraising appeal that mentioned neither Hamas, nor the 1,200 people murdered, nor the hostages. 

“A mistake,” he said. A remarkably convenient one.

Some 140 people, many of them children, were inside Temple Israel when the synagogue was attacked. El-Sayed condemned the attack, but added that “hurt people hurt people,” linking the attacker’s actions to the deaths of relatives in Lebanon. 

It took him months to acknowledge that he should have stopped at condemnation.

Meanwhile, the extremist Turkish streamer Hasan Piker, with whom he made campaign appearances, likened courting Jewish voters in West Bloomfield to campaigning for a black candidate in a “Ku Klux Klan neighborhood.”

El-Sayed condemned the comparison. Yet he had chosen Piker as a high-profile ally despite his already well-known record. He has since put some distance between them, but Piker remains one of his closest friends and advisers. Even now.

The most damning material concerns his links to the Muslim Brotherhood. No evidence shows that El-Sayed was a member or that he “pledged allegiance” to it. 

He was, however, responsible for recruiting members for the University of Michigan chapter of the Muslim Students Association, and later served as its vice president. An internal Brotherhood memorandum described the national MSA as one of “our organizations,” while a 2007 FBI assessment published by the IPT called it “the first official Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States.”

MSA meeting minutes record plans for a fundraiser for KindHearts, which later became the subject of an investigation into Hamas financing. 

El-Sayed attended meetings at which those plans were discussed.

Nor was this merely a matter of his student days. Between 2017 and 2020, he appeared repeatedly at ISNA, CAIR and ICNA–MAS events and personally appealed for financial support for CAIR. Brotherhood documents, statements to the FBI and statements by federal prosecutors have placed these organizations within the Brotherhood’s American network.

At a 2019 convention, he told Ilhan Omar that she was “absolutely right” to push back against repeated demands that she condemns Hamas.

In 2011, he had dismissed as “foolish” the comparison between a possible Brotherhood government in Egypt and Hamas’s rule in Gaza. In 2012, his name appeared in a letter supporting Mohamed Morsi’s decisions and calling for a “purge” of the media and the police.

El-Sayed has become the new darling of America’s “progressive” camp. “Progress,” that is, as embodied by the late Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan, Hamas, Qatar’s rulers and everyone else who dreams of freeing the West from the “corruption” of its democracy and freedoms—whether they are saying so openly yet or not.

We live in an age that lurches between the darkness of communism, back from the dead and making common cause with its Islamist counterpart, and a far right already having its suits tailored in anticipation of power. 

Two or three decades of dumbing down, disinformation, ignorance and corruption—and of mistaking democracy for a license to flatten every distinction and abolish every boundary—have, sadly, been enough to bring a new darkness to our doorstep.

Kizilyurek’s answer struck us. The president and vice-president (or whatever we end up calling the pair who take turns at the top) would be elected on a single ticket, he said, by the people as a whole. So they would share a common programme. Neither would be free to do as he pleased.

This is the most airbrushed version of the issue you could hope to hear. And it is deeply flawed, because it rests on wishful thinking, not on facts and realities. So let’s talk facts. The most workable ticket of that kind would be one put together by AKEL and the Republican Turkish Party of Tufan Erhurman and Mehmet Ali Talat. They would have every chance of being the first to govern the new Cyprus, and of running the country for years and years.

After all, they got on very well for many years, even before the crossings opened. Yet when Talat took over the ‘presidency’ in the occupied north and Demetris Christofias was in charge in the Republic of Cyprus, what we remember is Christofias calling him “comrade Talat”, and Talat asking him to please stop calling him comrade.

And when Erhurman took over in turn, he cooled things with AKEL. He would not even pick up the phone when they rang to congratulate him. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, once Talat and Erhurman took charge of the negotiations, their positions were indistinguishable from Turkey’s. Will that change after a settlement? Perhaps. Far more likely, it won’t. We can see where they stand. It hardly takes much analysis to work it out.

All this talk of a joint ticket is theoretical, of course, because in reality no such provision exists anywhere, and nobody is even proposing it (apart from Kizilyurek). If the Turkish side’s demand rested on that kind of arrangement, a rotating president elected on a single ticket, with a common programme and by the votes of the whole people, then there might be a chance of a genuinely united Cyprus, even in that form, even if it took a long time.

Because that could create the conditions to bring the country and its people together. It would force Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot parties to work together and, in some ideal, distant future, perhaps even to merge.

But that is not what the Turkish side’s demand is about. Quite the opposite. It is about cementing the racial segregation of the citizens, the land and the state. And doing it in such a way that they can never grow together as Cypriots who want what is best for the country they share. Hence the insistence on “one positive vote” (a veto, in plain English) in cabinet decisions on every single issue, not just those that concern and affect each community.

Besides, the single ticket for electing a president and vice-president who would rotate in office was a Greek Cypriot proposal. Nicos Anastasiades tabled it at Crans-Montana, too, as a joint ticket that would also include cross-voting and weighted voting. The Turkish side rejected it. Or does Kizilyurek know something we don’t? Has Erhurman accepted it while the rest of us weren’t looking?

Let’s not take whatever fantasy pops into our heads and dress it up as fact. That is taking the public for fools.

Annita, for her part, denies it with rather too much passion. “Nobody blackmailed me,” she cries, as if anyone listening will swallow it. She said it again on Emilia Kenevezou’s podcast. Does she realise that her explanations give her away, because she is effectively confirming the very thing she is trying to deny?

Let’s look at what she said. She pulled out of the race for DISY’s nomination for the 2028 presidential election because there was a chance Averof Neofytou would run as an independent. Pressing on with her own bid, she added, could have caused bigger problems for the party. She even stressed that Averof had left her bitter.

In other words, the unmistakable implication from Averof was this: “If I’m not DISY’s candidate, I’ll run as an independent.” That is not just a political disagreement. It is a message with specific consequences. An indirect but clear political threat. Political blackmail, plain and simple.

Averof didn’t need to hold a pistol to Annita’s temple (a favourite phrase of their old master and predecessor) for this to count as blackmail. Let’s not be ridiculous. Politics cannot hide behind verbal gymnastics, calling a spade a gardening implement. The public is not naive. It understands perfectly well what happened. What it cannot understand is why the main players refuse to tell it straight.

Annita Demetriou, though, is a broken record. She invokes her duty, as party leader, to protect DISY’s unity, and Averof’s smirk turns into a belly laugh. Of course she has that duty. But she also has another, just as important: to make sure her party wins. Because every election defeat comes at a price. For DISY, that price is neither theoretical nor trivial. Three years after its crushing failure, the party has still not managed to rebuild from the rubble.

Which raises an obvious question. How exactly does picking Averof Neofytou secure DISY’s success at the ballot box? After everything that happened in the 2023 presidential election, DISY may once again end up with a candidacy that carries the baggage of that contest. And the chances of it facing defeat yet again are, objectively, very high.

Who will carry the can if that happens? Averof Neofytou? But he will be heading off into political retirement. So he couldn’t care less what follows another defeat. Or will it be, as so often in politics, that excuses are hunted for after the event, the usual analyses are wheeled out, and the blame is dumped on everyone except those who made the decisions?

Annita clearly doesn’t see that the whole bill will be hers. Unity is, of course, essential. But it cannot become a fig leaf for choices that look set to lead to another defeat. Heaven help us if, every time a senior figure leaves the threat of an independent run hanging in the air, the party leader backs down.

Unity built on the fear of a split can never be real unity. It is a fragile compromise. It may hold things together for a while, but it guarantees neither political cohesion nor electoral success.

Political leadership is not judged only by its ability to avoid conflict. It is also judged by its ability to confront it. By its ability to defend its own credibility. By its ability to lead its party to victory at the polls. Its responsibility does not end with choosing the candidate. That is where it begins.

Unity with no prospect of winning achieves nothing but putting off the crisis. And a political leadership that dodges the truth today risks being confronted with a far harsher truth tomorrow.

Much of this is uncharted territory, and it is worrying. Ketamine, captagon pills, “pinaca” papers soaked in cannabis, and poppy: these, we are told, are the latest arrivals on the Cypriot “market”.

According to YKAN, Cyprus has entered a dangerous new era, the age of synthetic drugs. That has spurred the relevant state services into action. They now have to tackle a kind of problem regarded as more dangerous.

Meanwhile, the seizures made by YKAN and other agencies confirm the scale of the problem. Figures published by Phileleftheros show that YKAN has found more than 1,000 kilos of drugs of all kinds this year. The standout trend is the emergence of new substances, while cannabis is in decline.

And those statistics cover only what has been found. Some drugs, obviously, slip through the net. The state’s services may well be doing a very good job, but they cannot work miracles.

The sad truth is that we have a very serious drugs problem. We don’t need statistics to show it, or the authorities to point it out. It is now widely accepted that the drugs problem is already inside the gates, and the fight against it now has to be waged from within.

Play a problem down, as happened in the past, and it will slowly but surely grow into a monster. The authorities’ methods have certainly been strengthened and upgraded. They are more scientific, and that is paying off. Perhaps, as a state, we were slow off the mark. But that is no excuse.

Fresh forms of drugs are emerging. At this stage, we are told, the quantities are small. That, however, gives the authorities a window to step up deterrence.

Still, the obvious bears repeating: it is always results that count, not effort.