Pamboridis’s megaton bomb on organised crime and politics, or just a flashbang?

Opinion disyorganised crimepolitics Pamboridis’s megaton bomb on organised crime and politics, or just a flashbang? Giorgos Pamporides Relevant News Pamboridis’s megaton bomb on organised crime and politics, or just a flashbang? 26 August 2026 Marking a new chapter: EY Cyprus moves to Landmark Office Tower 26 August 2026 Aradippou bakery fire: structural check first, cause probe to follow 26 August 2026 Giorgos Kallinikou 26 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Giorgos Pamborides isn’t keen on DISY’s new rule change, the one that hands the choice of presidential candidate to the party’s full membership rather than to its top brass. It sets senior figures against each other right before a crucial national election, he said. Normally, a party’s internal housekeeping wouldn’t be any of our business. Not this time, though. Two reasons why. First, this particular change was born out of the worst crisis DISY has ever lived through, and some people clearly haven’t learned a thing from it. Second, this is about the value of democracy itself, and any retreat from it, wherever it comes from, is everybody’s problem. The ripples spread. There’s a third reason, too, a smaller one: it’s Pamborides doing the objecting. The man built his political reputation on nerve. This particular refusal doesn’t fit the brand. As for the substance of Pamborides’s objection, the answer sits right there in the enormous crisis DISY dragged itself through at the last election, a crisis the party still hasn’t fully shaken off. Pamborides seems to have forgotten awfully fast. The party leader, he said yesterday, should have the final say. Which is, word for word, exactly what happened in 2023. We don’t need to replay the whole sorry episode. Any other senior figure or party member (back then it was Christodoulides, now it could just as easily be Averof Neofytou or Pamborides himself) who wanted to run, who believed they could win, had no route to the nomination. We all know how that ended. And the situation only gets worse when the sidelined candidate happens to have real backing among a sizeable chunk of the party’s members and voters. Put those ingredients together and a crisis, a split, is not a risk. It’s a certainty, as 2023 proved. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: leaving the decision to a tight inner circle whilst thousands of party members are reduced to extras is a relic. It belongs to another era. It exposes a rot running through party leaderships, one serious enough to keep pushing supporters further and further away. DISY headquarters on Pindarou Street made its own move at the last presidential election, and it deserves a permanent spot in the museum of party history, if such a museum existed, as a lesson in what not to do. The will of 50,000 members was simply ignored. That statutory change was a genuine leap forward for democracy. Which is exactly why it’s such a shame that Pamborides is now flirting with such a short-sighted step backwards. An internal party vote will fracture DISY’s unity, he claimed yesterday, to bolster his position. It’s laughable. The wreckage from the last time unity was “fractured” in DISY is still being cleared up. Pamborides’s stance rests on an old-school party mentality, one that wants leadership to operate like a monarchy. That mindset is precisely what’s dragged parties, time and again, into decisions that collide head-on with their own grassroots. The result is well known: traditional parties wither, and voters drift off in other directions. We’re well into the third millennium. It’s time parties actually applied democratic procedures to their own rulebooks. Give 50,000 members the right to decide who they think should run for president, and DISY secures the exact opposite of what Pamborides is arguing for. A genuinely democratic choice is, by definition, one everybody has to accept. Lose the election under that system and responsibility doesn’t sit with some small clique of officials, it sits with the whole party. And crucially, the losers of that internal contest have no choice at all but to fall in behind the winner. Pamborides also said the candidates should sit down together to work out who’s best placed to win. Fine, that can happen. But what if they can’t agree? Beyond DISY’s internal affairs, in his remarks on Alpha yesterday Pamborides made another claim, and this one is deadly serious. It concerns everyone in this unfortunate little country of ours. He said, in so many words, that organised crime has infiltrated politics, and that its members have access to politicians. In any functioning state on this planet, a politician (a former minister, sitting MP, no less) making that kind of public allegation would have caused an earthquake. Here, it went by without so much as a murmur. Not a peep out of the government. If it isn’t true, someone needs to say so publicly and send the right message to the public. If it is true, Pamborides owes the authorities, and the country, the evidence to back it up. Nobody gets to drop a megaton bomb like that in public and simply leave it there. Unless, of course, it was never a bomb at all, just a flashbang, designed to grab attention and nothing more. In which case, what we’re really talking about is a bomb of pure irresponsibility. 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