EDEK, DIPA and the Solidarity Movement. He entered office without a coherent parliamentary majority with his coalition holding 17 of 56 seats in the parliament. Already this was seen as a structural weakness that had equally constrained his predecessor Nicos Anastasiades throughout his two terms. The intervening period was marked by significant party realignments. DISY, after the defeat of Averof Neophytou in the first round of the 2023 presidential election, underwent internal renewal under its new leader Annita Demetriou. It sought to reposition itself as a coherent centre-right opposition distinct from Christodoulides. AKEL drew cautious encouragement from Mavroyiannis’s narrow 4-point defeat, halted its electoral decline, and focused on consolidating its base. ELAM meanwhile pursued a sustained strategy of mainstreaming, intensifying its campaign on immigration and law-and-order. The 2024 European Parliamentary elections, which delivered a seat to 24-year-old YouTuber Fidias Panayiotou, confirmed an appetite for political disruption remained strong. Two new formations crystallised around this anti-establishment energy: ALMA, led by former Auditor General Odysseas Michaelides, targeting voters alienated by corruption; and Fidias Panayiotou’s Direct Democracy, drawing from younger, digitally-connected demographics. Together they represented a qualitatively new challenge to the party system, distinct from the protest-vote formations that had flickered and faded in previous cycles. Electoral Campaign The pre-election campaign was widely characterised as very polarised. Rather than substantive policy debate, the period was dominated by personal attacks, aggressive rhetoric, and a pervasive toxicity that visibly alienated voters. Multiple televised debates generated more confrontation than clarity, with newly formed parties projecting a confidence without concrete ideological narratives that ultimately backfired. The established parties, DISY and AKEL recalibrated only in the final weeks, shelving confrontation in favour of concrete proposals and programmatic seriousness. Substantively, four issues structured the campaign. Firstly, it was corruption and the lack of transparency and accountability of the political elites. ALMA built its entire campaign around anti-corruption themes, and Odysseas Michaelides’s credibility as a former Auditor General gave the party a distinctive positioning. Secondly, the focus was on economy and more particularly, inflation and housing affordability which were the issues most cited by voters. Immigration was also discussed widely but with less intensity compared to previous elections despite ELAM making immigration the centrepiece of its campaign. Finally, the Cyprus Problem, while broadly consensual among the two larger parties around a bizonal bicommunal federation, produced no momentum during the campaign with progress on negotiations being elusive. The Cypriot parliamentary elections of 2026 and their aftermath 2