Sunday’s parliamentary elections reshuffled Cyprus’s political landscape without bringing down the party system — though several established players now find themselves outside parliament for the first time in years.
The result confirmed that the two large parties, DISY and AKEL, retain strong organisational reach and loyal voter bases.
DISY held its ground while AKEL improved its share, yet the outcome falls short of a revival of the old two-party dominance. Both parties will need to find common ground with new and unfamiliar partners in the incoming House.
DISY, still carrying bruises from the 2023 presidential election and internal turbulence that undermined party leader Annita Demetriou, managed to consolidate its position.
For AKEL leader Stefanos Stefanou, the result ends a period of decline and counts as both a collective and a personal achievement — though the party’s inability to overtake DISY, despite the latter’s difficulties, is a question the left will have to sit with.
ELAM cements third place
The clearest winner of the night is ELAM, which recorded a roughly four-percentage-point gain and secured 40,567 votes — 10.9% of the total — consolidating its position as the third force in Cypriot politics.
The normalisation of the far right, reinforced by a section of the so-called popular right, was written into the result. The other parties largely ignored this trend during the campaign; they will find it harder to do so in the new parliament.
DIKO defies the polls
DIKO had been polling badly enough to threaten even its fourth-place standing. It recovered in the final weeks, emerging as the dominant force in the centre ground and the only government-supporting party to retain parliamentary representation.
Party leader Nikolas Papadopoulos’s call on election night to centrist voters could accelerate a realignment in that space — particularly now that DIPA has failed to enter parliament.
ALMA and ADK fall short of expectations
Both ALMA, led by former Auditor General Odysseas Michaelides, and Direct Democracy Cyprus (ADK), led by MEP Fidias Panayiotou, entered parliament but underperformed their polling. Neither will hold the pivotal role their leaderships had anticipated.
ALMA’s campaign strategy, built largely around populist accountability rhetoric, did not produce the returns the party had expected. With under 6% of the vote, its calculus for the 2028 presidential race becomes more complicated.
ADK, which secured roughly a quarter of Panayiotou’s 2024 European election share, arrives in parliament having presented few concrete policy proposals during the campaign. How it will behave as a parliamentary party remains an open question.
The night’s losers
EDEK’s failure to enter parliament cannot be put down to circumstances alone. The party’s long drift inward — a tendency that became entrenched practice — cost it its character and left it projecting ideological confusion. That a party founded in 1969 and continuously represented in parliament since then has now lost its seat is a significant rupture.
Party president Nikos Anastasiou, who took over the leadership relatively recently, pointed on election night to voters who did not return to the fold. That may be part of the picture, but it is not an explanation for a collapse of this scale. The party’s problem, as of Sunday night, is existential.
The Ecologists, another party with a long history and a genuine role in bringing environmental politics into Cypriot public life, also failed to make the threshold. DIPA’s exit from parliament may in part reflect the absence of party president Marios Garoyan from the candidate list.
Volt, which polls had given a reasonable chance of entering parliament, fell short — an outcome the analysis links in part to the Sandy affair, from which the party failed to keep a safe distance.
What happens next
Attention in party headquarters has already shifted to the election of the House Speaker. The scenario of Nikolas Papadopoulos taking the presidency of parliament is already in circulation, connected to a broader political calculation that extends to the 2028 presidential election and to cooperation between DISY and DIKO in the new House.
The government will also need to reckon with the absence of EDEK and DIPA from parliament. Both parties supported the administration and held ministerial posts.
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