Annita Demetriou’s scramble yesterday to follow Averof Neofytou and announce her own run for the presidency shows one thing: the big party of the right handled the crisis sparked by Nikos Christodoulides’s election three years ago so badly that it has never recovered.
DISY is still spinning in the maelstrom that began with its leadership’s impulsive (and chaotic) behaviour between the first and second rounds of that election. And it now risks stumbling into the next one, in 2028, in the same state, with the outcome already in plain sight: another lost presidential race.
Neofytou’s announcement yesterday does not yet pit him against the party. He has not ruled out submitting his candidacy to the party’s internal process. But it is obvious his mind is made up, and there is no going back. In effect, he has put a gun to the leadership’s head. Either it backs him, or he goes it alone and splits the party, handing the advantage to candidates from outside its ranks.
Demetriou’s hasty announcement that she too will run, and will of course put her candidacy “before the party’s members”, leaves no room for a deal. But with that move, she has tossed the dilemma straight back to Averof. He must now decide whether he, too, will put his candidacy “before the party’s members” or strike out on his own. In 2023, with the party’s official backing, he could not even get past the first round. What makes him think he can win without it?
Perhaps he believes he can persuade voters that he alone can handle and solve the Cyprus problem. But which of his positions does he imagine are winning them over? Can he really not see that people are worried, that they feel uneasy, when what they take from his positions is that he is closer to “any solution” than to a viable, workable settlement?
We genuinely rate him as a highly capable politician, with judgement and insight, and he has every right to seek the presidency (plenty of lightweights fancy their chances, after all). Which is why the question has to be asked: are his decisions driven by revenge and nothing else? He feels betrayed, that much is certain. He even told Frixos Dalitis on the philenews podcast yesterday that “the betrayed never betray, but at the same time they must make sure they are not betrayed again”. Betrayed by whom, though? By Christodoulides, certainly. And, going by what he said on the podcast, probably by Annita too.
He recounted how, at a fish taverna, Demetriou and her closest aide told him: “You’ve got the clout, so make sure we get Annita re-elected House President, and then we all go into the presidential election united, with you.” As everyone knows, he delivered, they got Annita re-elected to the House chair, and so they owe him. If that is how it went, he has a point: they do owe him. But since when does a modern politician decide to run for President of the Republic on that basis? And what about electability? The split? The financial and political cost? The party’s own decision?
The real point, though, since we started with the crisis in DISY, is that this fish taverna meeting blows the party charter, its democratic procedures and any respect for its members sky-high. They decided that the party’s presidential candidate would be chosen at the ballot box by the entire membership. They even wrote it into the charter. Only for the real decisions to be taken in a fish taverna by two or three people?
What happens next will be interesting. It might even be good for a laugh.
