The centre-right Democratic Party of Cyprus (Diko) has elected challenger Nicolas Papadopoulos as its next president by ousting the incumbent Marios Karoyian in a marginal victory with mutual accusations of vote rigging and manipulation.
Only 64% of the party faithful showed up to vote on Sunday, despite both rival camps charging that their opponent had attracted new recruits to beef up their chances of election.
The new president, son of the party’s second leader, Tasos Papadopoulos, will take part in Monday’s National Council meeting in his new capacity where analysts will be waiting to see if he will change the party’s policy on the handling of the Cyprus problem and return to a hard-line approach, jeopardising the fragile coalition with the ruling Democratic Rally party (Disy).
Papadopoulos got 51.12% of the vote and Karoyian took the remaining 48.88%, with nearly 25,000 members voting, despite the recruitment of nearly 18,000 new voters in the past few months. A total 38,600 members had the right to vote.
Karoyian objected to the first count claiming that some 400 old and new party members were not allowed to vote in Paphos district, while the final count for the capital Nicosia was only announced at 3am after a gross discrepancy was discovered with 1,000 more votes accounted for than those that went to the polls.
Nicolas Papadopoulos is the fourth leader of the party founded in 1976 by former Cyprus president Spyros Kyprianou, father of former European health commissioner and foreign minister Markos Kyprianou.
Diko, often dubbed the “civil servants” party because of a major membership drive by Spyros Kyprianou in the 1970s and 1980s, will also have to come to terms with the conditions laid down by the Troika of international lenders who have provided Cyprus with a 10 bln euro bailout programme. The party has maintained a cautious stance over the privatisation of government services and utilities that the current administration needs to push through as part of the austerity measures.
Party allegiance has dwindled over the decades with Diko claiming only 15.8% in the last parliamentary elections in 2011, securing eight of the 56 seats in the House of Representatives.
