AKEL’s Central Committee is meeting today at the party’s Ezekias Papaioannou headquarters in extended composition to decide its position on the House Speaker presidency, ahead of Thursday’s plenary vote. The Pancyprian Coordinating Committee of the Social Alliance, AKEL’s electoral partner, has been invited, along with AKEL MPs who do not sit on the committee. The format is not unprecedented but signals the weight the party attaches to the outcome.
Decisions at the wire
Information emerging from party offices suggests no party intends to fully show its hand before Thursday’s plenary session. One likely outcome of today’s Central Committee meeting, currently in progress, is that AKEL will not publicly announce its final position on the Speaker.
That could mean the General Secretary or the party Secretariat is authorised to hold consultations and sound out intentions. Alternatively, the Secretariat could be authorised, on the basis of today’s discussion, to make its final recommendation to the parliamentary group, which would meet ahead of the plenary. Either way, AKEL’s position on the Speaker may not be officially known until shortly before the vote.
The Stefanou-Papadopoulos call
Earlier this morning, before the meeting of the DIKO Secretariat, AKEL General Secretary Stefanos Stefanou spoke by telephone with DIKO leader Nikolas Papadopoulos. The conclusion drawn from what was said, and from the discussion that followed inside the DIKO Secretariat, is that the scenario of AKEL backing Papadopoulos’s candidacy faces reservations within DIKO, though it has not been ruled out.
What does appear to have been signalled from AKEL’s side is a willingness to keep channels of cooperation open. That can be read as an indirect sounding out of whether another name might be discussed — though any such name would have to come from DIKO itself rather than as an AKEL intervention in DIKO’s internal affairs.
Charalambides’s statement
Adding a further variable is a statement made today by Irene Charalambides to Reporter. In a post the previous week she had referenced the events of 2021 and warned that they should not be repeated, with people close to her suggesting she might differentiate her vote from the rest of ALMA. Today, she said she was fully prepared to back the AKEL General Secretary’s candidacy.
The statement obviously has a tail to it — linked either to the distribution of parliamentary committee chairs or designed to muddy the waters. In any case, the final shape of the contest may be such that whether Charalambides shows party discipline within her new political home is no longer decisive. ALMA leader Odysseas Michaelides has previously proposed her as a compromise candidate, but AKEL is considered extremely unlikely to bring her into the discussion.
The three scenarios
AKEL’s decision will be decisive in shaping the final scenario. Whatever the moment at which the party leadership shows its hand, the three options before it are these:
The first is an independent AKEL candidacy with Stefanou as the nominee. With ALMA’s votes, he comfortably reaches a second round. His chances of being elected then depend on which of Annita Demetriou or Nikolas Papadopoulos drops out in the first round, and what the loser then does in the second. The question is whether DIKO would back AKEL’s candidate.
The second is AKEL backing Papadopoulos from the first round, which would in effect elect him, given that ELAM will not support Demetriou and would therefore either back Papadopoulos or abstain.
The third scenario is that the first-round alliances are configured in a way that leaves Demetriou out of the second round. This could happen through a DIKO–ELAM–Direct Democracy equation behind Papadopoulos’s candidacy, paired with an AKEL–ALMA equation behind Stefanou or another candidate. In that scenario, Demetriou would be left with only the 17 votes of DISY’s parliamentary group.
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