Is the sun setting on DISY?

A party’s crisis doesn’t start with its grassroots, and it doesn’t blow in from outside. It starts at the top. In Cyprus, the decline of every party, without exception, is the work of weak leaderships that didn’t just fail to inspire their own people but actively drove voters away by what they did. The spotlight is now fixed firmly on Pindarou Street, DISY’s headquarters. That isn’t, as we’ve been told these past few days, because everyone who writes about the party is out to get it. The spotlight is there for a simpler reason: for decades, DISY craved the starring role. A party that governed for 20 years, and is now scheming (through backroom dealings everyone has heard about) to get back into power at any cost, can hardly be surprised that people are watching. Let’s not forget that for years, at least until 2013, DISY was the model of how a party should be run. It was the natural party of government , with everything that implies. If it has since become something else, nobody is to blame but the people who made the decisions then and are making them now. After the shock of the first revelations about the dinner at a fish tavern, and the talk of deals over the presidency of the House and of the Republic, out came the old tape with its familiar chorus: DISY has weathered crises before and always come back stronger. As a theory, fine. But this time the comparison doesn’t hold. You have to look at the crises the party actually went through: when they happened, in what circumstances, and how they played out. When the party faithful say DISY has survived crises before, they usually mean 2004 and the Annan plan referendum. And yes, that crisis was largely overcome, and quickly. The wounds healed, and the party returned to power. Back then, the party had Nicos Anastasiades. He saw the damage. He fixed it. Slowly and steadily, he put the DISY jigsaw back together, piece by piece. The next big crisis came in 2023, when the party failed to reach a presidential run-off for the first time in its history. Three and a half years on, that crisis hasn’t been overcome. If anything, the latest events and revelations show things are getting worse. The leader at the time, the big loser of that election, didn’t stay to prop up his party and pick up the pieces. He simply upped and walked out, leaving the party to fend for itself, while still trying to control who would succeed him and how he himself would operate. Today, the same man questions how clean things are inside his own party, declaring that he “won’t play with a marked deck again”. What came next was the weakest leadership in DISY’s history, and that is why the whole Pindarou structure is now visibly cracking. It knows exactly what it wants for itself. Politically, it has no idea where it’s going. Self-interest trumps everyone and everything. So, with all this going on, is the sun setting on DISY? There is no easy or clear answer. If things carry on as they are, then yes, it could get a lot worse. It could change if Pindarou had leaders with the nerve to act. Right now, there isn’t one.