No, DISY’s leadership didn’t fight fair

Opinion disyelectionspolitics No, DISY’s leadership didn’t fight fair Disy Eklogew Relevant News No, DISY’s leadership didn’t fight fair 18 September 2026 India finds Nestle baby food sample substandard, takes legal action 18 September 2026 “I thought he’d had a stroke”: wife describes husband’s West Nile virus ordeal 18 September 2026 Chrysanthos Manoli 18 September 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber It’s this column’s view, and we said as much the day after the election, that DISY deputy leader Giannis Karousos badly misread the parliamentary results for his party. He behaved like a student hyped up at some election-night rally, not like a seasoned political operator. From the morning after the vote, it was obvious Karousos had convinced himself that DISY’s internal rift was a nightmare that had simply passed, because the party managed to claw back a decent share of the voters who’d drifted in and out over the years. And, even more wrongly, that every one of those voters would follow the party straight into the presidential race too. Karousos and others inside DISY genuinely believed, and said so at the time, that with the share the party pulled in the parliamentary vote, DISY had, apparently, already booked its place in the second round of the 2028 presidential election. How do smart, capable people get it this wrong? They do. Why and how is a different question altogether. Karousos now says it’s time to separate the sheep from the goats, the “faithful” from the “traitors”, and for DISY, as the opposition (if you can even call it that, given how little the role has matched reality over the last three years), to fight the campaign fair, with its own candidate, aiming to win back the presidency. Yes. We all want every party to fight its political and electoral battles fairly, to earn its goals honestly. But how fair was DISY’s own parliamentary campaign, really? How fair was it for the entire party to quietly drop its supposed opposition tone, purely as a tactical move? They spent day and night banging on about Cyprus needing to move forward through cooperation between government and parliament, talking up the value of working with the ruling coalition and sidelining the naysayers, all so key bills could pass and the country could stay on track for growth. DISY didn’t act like an opposition party in the parliamentary elections. And fair enough, it worked. It paid off at the ballot box. But it did it to con both current and former DISY voters who backed, and still back, the Christodoulides government. That’s this column’s claim, plainly. Has Karousos really forgotten, or simply erased, the phoney, hypocritical transformation the DISY leadership pulled off before the parliamentary vote, one clearly designed to win back the thousands of DISY voters who backed Christodoulides and still support him today? DISY’s election win owed a hefty chunk of its success to Christodoulides’s own supporters, and to the president himself. Caught up in that buzz, Karousos apparently decided there was no reason to keep up the act any longer. DISY had stayed the largest party, dodged the wipeout several polls had predicted, and landed a result that, as Onoufrios Koullas admitted on election night, nobody saw coming. The morning after, Karousos and others like him seemed to think DISY could crank the volume back up, turn opposition again for opposition’s sake, and spend the years to 2028 grinding down the government and Christodoulides. So, Mr Karousos, was that a fair fight? Wanting to cash in on the government’s wins ahead of a parliamentary election, courting Christodoulides’s own DISY-voting base to do it, then the very next day playing the serious, responsible opposition force gearing up to reclaim power? No, the DISY leadership’s fight in the parliamentary elections wasn’t fair, and it’s unlikely to be any fairer heading into the presidential race. DISY is the opposition only in name, and only because its leadership has chosen to call it that. That’s their prerogative. But we have eyes and ears too, to watch, to listen, and to understand exactly what’s going on. The Christodoulides government is, in effect, a DISY government with a DIKO tinge, and without the baggage of the outright DISY government of the previous five years. If Annita Demetriou wants a shot at the presidency too, fair enough, we get it. If Averof Neophytou wants his triumphant rematch, we get that too. If Giorgos Pamboridis wants to get under their skin, fine. What we’re asking, as citizens of this Republic, is simple: don’t dress up personal ambition, grudges and fixations as the public interest or party patriotism. 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