Sunday’s parliamentary vote produced a result that tells two stories at once. DISY won with 27.1 per cent and 17 seats; AKEL came second with 23.9 per cent and 15 seats. Below them, the far-right ELAM jumped from 6.8 per cent in 2021 to 10.9 per cent, claiming 8 seats and finishing joint third alongside DIKO.
Two new parties, ALMA on 5.8 per cent and Direct Democracy Cyprus on 5.4 per cent, also entered parliament. EDEK fell to 3.2 per cent and lost all its seats, the first time in the party’s 57-year history it has been shut out of parliament; its leader resigned the same night. DIPA also failed to cross the threshold. Voter turnout hit 66.91 per cent, the lowest in Cyprus’s modern electoral history.
That collapse of the centre did not happen in a vacuum. Voters went to the polls with corruption and the cost of living high on the agenda, but the strategic backdrop mattered too.
President Nikos Christodoulides has spent recent days warning that Turkey’s proposed Blue Homeland maritime law, which would codify Ankara’s expansive claims over the eastern Mediterranean in formal legislation, would require a concerted European response.
ELAM Gains From More Than Anger
ELAM’s rise is often explained through migration and identity politics, and the party did campaign hard on a hard line over migration and the island’s ethnic division.
That is true, but it is only part of the story. The broader point is that a party once treated as marginal now benefits from a more general collapse of confidence in the parties that promised moderation without solving much. When EDEK, one of Cyprus’s oldest parties, disappears from parliament in a single night, something structural has shifted.
The new entrants underline the same mood. ALMA was founded by former Auditor General Odysseas Michaelides and campaigned explicitly on anti-corruption. Direct Democracy Cyprus is led by Fidias Panayiotou, a YouTuber who won a European Parliament seat in 2024 with no political experience and has since built a following by treating politics as a transparency exercise. When voters punish both the centre and the old party machine at once, the far right no longer looks like an isolated protest. It starts to look like one expression of a wider anti-system mood.
Turkey Sharpens the Mood
That mood is easier to understand in the shadow of Turkey.
Christodoulides wants a European reaction if Ankara proceeds with Blue Homeland legislation, arguing that the doctrine, which asserts Turkish maritime jurisdiction across vast stretches of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, reaches well beyond Cyprus alone. The doctrine is not new, but turning it into formal law would deepen the sense that Turkey is trying to normalise a more expansive regional posture, and Cyprus would sit at the sharpest end of that pressure.
For Cypriot voters, that kind of exposure reinforces the appeal of harder language. It does not mean every ELAM voter is driven mainly by geopolitics. It does mean that a country living with division, migration pressure, and Turkish assertiveness at sea offers fertile ground for a right that promises bluntness over compromise. ELAM more than doubled its parliamentary representation on Sunday. That is not a fringe result.
The Centre Now Looks Exposed
The biggest losers were not only individual parties but the broader centrist coalition around Christodoulides.
With EDEK, DIPA, and the Ecologist movement all out of parliament, the president’s natural legislative ecosystem has narrowed sharply ahead of the 2028 presidential race. DISY and AKEL still dominate the larger blocs, and ELAM remains well behind them with 8 seats in a 56-seat house. But the island’s right is being pulled towards a harder register at exactly the moment when security arguments are easier to sell.
Cyprus has not suddenly become a far-right state. It has become a state where the far right fits more comfortably into the political weather. With living costs high, corruption still biting, and Ankara pressing at sea, that weather may not clear soon.
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