Our View: Demetriou chooses unity over the presidency

In Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a judge used an unconventional method to decide who the true mother of a boy, whom two women claimed to be their son. One is the boy’s wealthy birth mother, Natella and the other is an impoverished peasant woman, Grusha, who had brought up the boy when his mother, the governor’s wife had fled a revolt without him. The judge, Azdak, draws a circle on the ground, places the boy in the middle and instructs the two women to grab an arm and pull. The woman that could yank the boy out of the circle would be regarded as his mother. Grusha does not pull at all and Natella yanks the boy out of the circle. Azdak asks the women to do this a second time and Natella again roughly pulls the boy from the circle while Grusha sobs that she could not hurt the child by pulling his arm. Azdak decides that the true mother is Grusha who did not want to hurt the child. We were reminded of the play on Thursday when House president and Disy leader Annita Demetriou announced that she decided to withdraw from the contest for the party’s presidential candidate. After a meeting with Averof Neophytou and Giorgos Pamboridis, both of whom would seek the candidacy, Demetriou said that for the sake of the party’s unity she would withdraw her candidacy. Speaking after the meeting Demetriou said there was a “danger that the party would be divided again” and that would be “disastrous for the party and for the country.” She considered it her responsibility, as leader of the party, not to allow this to happen. “For me the primary concern is the unity and cohesiveness of the party,” she said. It was the right move, given Neophytou’s threat to run as an independent, a move that would split the Disy vote, and wreck the chances of the party candidate advancing to the second round. It was admirable that Demetriou withdrew despite opinion polls showing her to be the most popular of the Disy candidates and the one with the best prospects for winning the presidential election. She was right, however, to fear that a three-way contest or, worse still, a two-way contest with Neophytou as an independent, would have caused deeper and more lasting divisions than those suffered in 2023. And as she said on Thursday, Disy had to contest the presidential elections with one candidate. To her credit, Demetriou did what she considered to be best for Disy. She had the strength and moral courage – something rarely displayed by our politicians – to put aside her personal ambition in order to safeguard the party’s unity. She was not prepared to pull the party apart in the pursuit of the presidency, as the current president had done four years ago.