Yiorgos Lillikas, the candidate with the third-best results in Sunday’s first round of the presidential elections with a quarter of the votes, is expected to launch a new centre party within the next few months, incorporating the socialist Edek and outcasts from the centre-right Democratic Party (Diko).
This could revive past efforts to merge Edek and Diko, who seem to agree on a wide variety of ideological, political and economic issues, and could later choose whether to join the Socialist or Liberal groupings in the European Parliament.
Lillikas, an independent candidate who campaigned on an anti-bailout platform, won 24.9% of the votes supported by Edek, a splinter group from Diko and part of the nationalist European Party, Evroko. His arguments to sell all of the future contracts from one of the recently discovered offshore natural gas fields, in order to pay down the island’s runaway public sector debt, gained popular support, as did his agenda about reducing unemployment and helping out small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Lillikas will announce on Friday if he will throw his support behind any of the two front-runners in the first round of the elections, opposition Democratic Party leader Nicos Anastasiades, who garnered 45.4% and communist Akel’s Stavros Malas, who secured 26.9%.
Diko’s former vice president Nicolas Papadopoulos and MP Zacharias Koullias backed Lillikas’ campaign, and will probably be flanked by Diko MPs Sophoclis Fittis, Antonis Antoniou and Yiorgos Prokopiou, as well as former deputy leader Yiorgos Colokassides who was shunned by his party several years ago.
Diko is contemplating its future, as its support for Anastassiades was not as much as expected, considering that Disy alone contributed about 30-33% of Anastassiades’ votes. Evroko leaders are also in a dilemma, while the leaders of Edek and the Greens have said they will allow their members to vote with their conscience on Sunday.
Next Sunday's winner will replace outgoing communist President Demetris Christofias, whom Anastasiades has charged with running the economy to the ground.
If successful, Anastasiades faces a long list of challenges in convincing the European Union and IMF to sign off on a rescue before the tiny state faces a 1.4-bln euro debt repayment in June.
He will have to assuage fears that Cyprus will never be able to pay back its debt even if given a bailout loan equivalent to the size of its economy, and quell concerns in northern Europe that the island is a hub for laundering money from Russia.
A new administration will be sworn in on Thursday, February 28, a few days before the next Eurogroup meeting in Brussels. However, Eurozone leaders have said they will postpone a final decision on a Cyprus bailout to the end of March, causing greater frustration within a cash-strapped economy and record unemployment.
Talks on a rescue, which have dragged on for eight months, have also proven tricky because almost any way of solving the crisis – from restructuring debt to imposing losses on banks – could set a precedent for other troubled states and damage sentiment just as fears of a Greek euro zone exit fade.
Cyprus sought financial help last year after its banks suffered huge losses from Greece's sovereign debt restructuring. The island, which has been shut out of international financial markets since May 2011, needs about 17 bln euros in aid – roughly the same as its gross domestic product.
