DISY nomination contender Giorgos Pamborides said on Thursday he was pleased with Averof Neofytou’s decision to enter the race for the party’s presidential candidacy. He also challenged Giannis Karousos to name the party officials he says are at DISY headquarters in the morning and the Presidential Palace in the afternoon.
Pamborides, a former health minister, said that as an ordinary DISY parliament member he had no role either at the party’s Pindarou Street headquarters or at the Presidential Palace.
Speaking on the Alpha Kalimera programme a day before the deadline for submitting the 500 signatures required to stand, he said he had already collected them. On Wednesday, he had acknowledged he was having difficulties. He described the process as “a thankless formality” that had taken up a lot of his time, as he is not a career politician. He pointed out that 100 signatures are needed to stand for President of the Republic, while a nomination through the party requires 500, spread proportionally across the districts.
On former President Nicos Anastasiades’s proposal for a deal between DISY and President Nikos Christodoulides on the second round of the presidential election, Pamborides said he was certain Anastasiades would support DISY’s candidate. He said he assumed Anastasiades wanted a centre-right mindset to remain in government, and that his own candidacy fully addressed those concerns.
On the debate over whether the loser of the 28 November internal vote will respect the result, Pamborides said it was unthinkable for someone who had run in the party’s internal process to then go to the elections on their own.
Neofytou’s press office said the former DISY leader would go to the party’s headquarters at 5pm on Thursday to submit the forms supporting his candidacy.
The deadline for the forms is Friday, so that DISY staff have time to check that they are valid before candidacies are formally submitted.
