FES AND PCC BRIEFING THE CYPRIOT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2023 AND ITS AFTERMATH Vasiliki Triga Nikandros Ioannidis March 2023 1. INTRODUCTION The Republic of Cyprus is the only full presidential democracy in the European Union. The presidential election is by far the most important election since the President of the Republic is both the head of state and the head of government. Cypriot voters perceive the presidential election as the most significant of all elections, and as a result, abstention rates are lower than in the other national election, namely the parliamentary elec­tions. The President of the Republic is elected directly by the people(a majority of votes is needed), his/her term of office lasts five years, and his/her stay in power is not dependent on the parliament. In several instances in the past, the president did not secure the support of a majority of members of parlia­ment(MPs) and therefore required support from opposition parties to implement his programmatic pledges. A prominent example of this is the current presidency of Nicos Anastasia­des, who had the support of only 17 out of 56 MPs in the parliament, the MPs of his own party, centre-right DISY(Dem­ocratic Rally- EPP)- the largest party in Cyprus. Anastasiades was elected twice(2013 and 2018) and, for that reason, had no right to run in the latest elections. The newly elected pres­ident, Nikos Christodoulides, is the eighth president of the Re­public of Cyprus since 1960. Nicos Anastasiades was elected in 2013 at the height of the Eurozone crisis, with Cyprus especially hard hit by the haircut on Greek debt(Cypriot banks had invested heavily in Greek bonds). On taking office at the end of February 2013, he was called upon to adopt important and politically costly decisions aimed at reinvigorating the Cypriot economy, which was in severe recession. On the so-called Cyprus Problem- the ethnic division of the island- Nicos Anastasiades took one step closer towards a negotiated solution in the summer of 2017 at the Swiss resort of Crans Montana. Anastasiades was fortunate to have as his interlocutor the leader of the Turkish Cypriot com­munity, Mustafa Akinci. In the spring of 2015 Akinci had man­aged to defeat the two candidates of the biggest Turkish Cyp­riot parties with the resolution of the Cyprus Problem as his main campaign pledge. There has been much speculation about what actually happened in Crans Montana when the negotiations failed to reach a final resolution plan. Anastasia­des accused Turkey and the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, of being intransigent and inflexible in making sig­nificant concessions, while Anastasiades’ critics within the Greek Cypriot community accused him of deliberately avoid­ing a final agreement given that the 2018 presidential elec­tions were only six months away and that this may have been his top priority. His second term was tainted by major corrup­tion scandals involving associates, family members and himself, resulting in a significant drop in his approval rating among voters. 2. POLITICAL PARTIES AND PRESIDENTIAL CAN­DIDATES The 2023 presidential election was preceded by the parliamen­tary elections in May 2021, where the abstention rate reached a record high of 34.28%. This was partly due to the elector­ate’s increased disinterest in the political establishment follow­ing the revelation of numerous corruption scandals and mis­conduct(most notably the“Golden Passports” scandal). Not only did the mainstream parties(DISY, AKEL, DIKO, EDEK) lose electoral strength, but, for the first time, 14.5% of the elector­ate voted for niche/populist parties(nevertheless, all these failed to reach the 3.6% threshold, and none secured a seat in the new legislature). Although the mainstream parties re­mained the main political actors, after the 2021 parliamentary elections they were weakened and faced growing distrust from the electorate. Democratic Rally(DISY- EPP), the party of the outgoing Pres­ident of the Republic Nicos Anastasiades, remained the larg­est party with 27.8%. With the conclusion of the parliamen­tary elections, an intra-party contest began within DISY for the presidential nomination. Two high-ranking DISY officials, the party president since 2013, Averof Neophytou, and the then foreign minister and close associate of Nicos Anastasia­des, Nikos Christodoulides, expressed interest in running for the 2023 presidential election. The internal party procedures for nominating the party’s candidate started in late 2021, 14 months before the election. Nikos Christodoulides, who had already unofficially started campaigning for the presidential 1