Results The elections were contested by 23 parties and independent lists with a record 753 candidates submitting their candidacies, 102 more candidates than the previous elections in 2021. The final results are shown in Table 1. Looking at the electoral result, we immediately realise that there are five winners, DISY, AKEL, ELAM and the two new entries, ALMA and Direct Democracy. For DISY, the result was simultaneously a relief and a warning. Opinion polls had consistently indicated that the party would suffer a significant loss of support, which would have led to calls for Annita Demetriou’s stepping down. Instead, the party maintained its share of the vote, preserved its title as the biggest party, and kept all 17 seats it had held since 2021. In that narrow sense, the result was a personal vindication for Annita Demetriou, who had taken over the party leadership in March 2023 in difficult circumstances, following the party presidential(Averof Neophytou) candidate’s humiliating elimination in the first round of the presidential election(he finished third with just 26.1% of the vote). The deeper structural story, however, is less comfortable. DISY’s vote share has declined at each of the last three parliamentary elections. So, the 27.1% represents a party that has lost roughly ten percentage points since its peak. The party’s decision to govern from opposition against Christodoulides proved electorally sound and allowed it to rebuild a distinct identity rather than being absorbed into a government whose support parties were punished at the polls. For AKEL, the 2026 result carried a significance that went beyond the modest numerical gain. Improving from 22.3% to 23.9% and retaining all 15 seats, the party achieved something it had not managed in over a decade: reversing a downward electoral trend that had come to define its trajectory since its peak years in the late 2000s. The electoral result was received with enthusiasm by the party and was attributed to concrete ideological positioning and policies on workers’ rights, housing, cost of living, and support for pensioners and youngsters. The deeper question the result leaves open is whether 23.9% represents a genuine floor from which AKEL can rebuild, or simply a temporary stabilisation. The third winner is clearly ELAM that achieved the most striking result of the election, more than doubling its seat count from 4 to 8 and pushing its vote share from 6.8% to 10.9%. This makes ELAM the third-largest party in parliament for the first time in its history, overtaking DIKO. The trajectory is striking in its consistency: from 2 seats in 2016, to 4 in 2021, to 8 in 2026 manifests a doubling of parliamentary representation at each successive election. The result nonetheless came in below what pre-election polling had suggested, with several surveys placing the party above 13%. Yet the shortfall relative to polls should not obscure the structural significance of what was achieved. ELAM has now consolidated itself as a permanent fixture of the Cypriot political landscape. The normalisation dimension is perhaps more consequential than the vote share itself. For the first time, other parliamentary parties will need to engage with ELAM’s positions on immigration, national identity, and law and order not as fringe provocations but as the stated preferences of approximately one in nine Cypriot voters. Yet the arithmetic of the new parliament makes such categorical exclusion increasingly difficult to sustain in practice, particularly on immigration legislation where ELAM’s positions overlap with those of a significant portion of the centre-right electorate. How the mainstream parties navigate this tension will be one of the defining governance challenges of the 2026-2031 term, and a critical variable in determining whether its trajectory continues upward toward 2028. Turning to DIKO, we observe that the party held broadly steady at 10%(down 1.3%), retaining 8 seats. As a core member of the Christodoulides government coalition, DIKO’s result was seen as satisfactory by the party leadership compared to what was depicted by opinion polls before the elections, though the loss of one seat signalled some erosion of its centrist electoral base to newer formations. ALMA and Direct Democracy each entered parliament for the first time with 4 seats apiece. Together, they collectively represent approximately 11% of the electorate which is a clear indication of the anti-establishment feeling in Cyprus. ALMA’s founder Odysseas Michaelides had built his public profile as Auditor General through high-profile investigations into public sector corruption. Fidias Panayiotou’s Direct Democracy capitalised on his social media notoriety and the momentum built during the 2024 European elections. However, it should be noted that both parties fell significantly short of their pre-election polling figures, which had consistently placed them in double digits. The final weeks of the campaign exposed their structural weaknesses: an absence of organisational machinery, a lack of concrete policy proposals, and a campaign tone that many voters perceived as presumptuous. Their parliamentary durability will depend largely on the cohesion and seriousness they demonstrate once inside the House. Among the losers, the socialist EDEK suffered the sharpest proportional decline of any established party, falling from 6.7% to 3.3%, just below the 3.6% threshold, losing all four of its parliamentary seats. Notably, its previous vote share was itself achieved in alliance with the smaller EVROKO party, meaning EDEK’s standalone support was already weaker than that number suggested. The collapse to 3.3% therefore likely reflects not merely electoral volatility but the true depth of the party’s decline, raising serious questions about whether this is a recoverable setback or a sign that EDEK has The Cypriot parliamentary elections of 2026 and their aftermath 3