Watch out, there are playground monitors* on Pindarou Street

Opinion disyNikos Christodoulidespolitics Watch out, there are playground monitors* on Pindarou Street Ce B4 Ce B7 Cf 83 Cf 85 Id 1657550 Relevant News Hats off to our firefighting crews 5 August 2026 Watch out, there are playground monitors* on Pindarou Street 5 August 2026 Limassol’s daily ordeal 5 August 2026 newsroom 5 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Can a political party, in 2026, still treat its own officials, members, even its supporters as property? Apparently it can. But whoever thinks that clearly hasn’t noticed what era we’re living in. Because it was never really true, except for a tight inner core who genuinely were treated as… party property. Except for a wider circle, big or small, who declared their loyalty and fell into line. That was a “choice”. Whether out of fanaticism, or self-interest. In recent days, with reshuffling under way in government, officials from DISY (Democratic Rally) have been shouting, protesting, warning, even threatening, all because names of DISY-linked figures have been floated publicly for ministerial posts. Apparently, that’s a sin. A sin simply for being sounded out, and an even worse one if they actually agreed to take the job. It’s a simple matter, really, and it needs no toxicity, and certainly no political bully-boy tactics. If an official or a member chooses to join the “enemy” camp, they’ve put themselves outside the party. Simple as that. But this “sin” has history. And that history is, first and foremost, DISY’s own. A few examples, just to jog the memory. DISY only became a parliamentary party thanks to… defection! Worth remembering: in the 1976 election, thanks to the electoral system and the cooperation between AKEL, DIKO and EDEK, the Democratic Rally was left outside parliament altogether. In 1977, DIKO’s MP for the Nicosia constituency, Leontios Ierodiakonou, quit his party, and in 1980 he crossed over to DISY. From that moment on, DISY had a seat in parliament. In November 1997, DIKO decided to pull out of the Clerides government. At the same time, it called on its own ministers to resign. Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides and Labour Minister Andreas Moussioutas chose to stay put in the Clerides cabinet instead. There are plenty more examples of defections that could be listed, and not just from DISY. Just as there are pre-election transfers and switches, too. These things happen, however much they irritate people. And they happen on every side. The truth is everyone uses everyone else, because the parties themselves have flattened out their own ideological differences. As for the party of permanent outrage, they’ve got remarkably short memories too. They forget that back in 2023, between the first and second rounds of the presidential election, they jumped the fence and fed AKEL’s campaign team with their own party’s membership rolls. They did it to take on their… common enemy, Nikos Christodoulides. Back then, that wasn’t a “sin”, it was a political choice, a deliberate act. Of course, they didn’t have the guts to do it publicly, out in the open. Not just now, but always: there’s no such thing as owning people, full stop. In a democracy, people are free to do as they choose. You can criticise their actions, their decisions, their choices, but you can’t go around… trying to terrorise anyone who “doesn’t fall in line”. We’re not living in the age of the playground monitors. Or maybe, for some people on Pindarou Street (DISY’s own headquarters, and elsewhere, to be fair), we still are. And there are officials who’ve appointed themselves to the role. In DISY, spotting them isn’t exactly hard! For years now, parties haven’t been able to drag citizens along by the sleeve, the way the old Nionios song used to put it. Haven’t all the parties noticed this themselves, from the shrinking vote shares they keep posting at every election? They know it. But they do nothing about it, because the decline, the decay, is exactly what keeps them comfortably lodged in office, enjoying… the good life that comes with power. That’s the short-sighted politics of people who can’t grasp that everything around them is changing, everyone except themselves. *Paidonomoi, or “playground monitors,” the person entrusted with supervising children in a school, boarding house, etc. (Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek). In ancient Greece, chiefly in Sparta, paidonomoi were responsible for overseeing children, maintaining public order among them, and providing their basic education. 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