With less than two weeks to go before the May 24 parliamentary elections, Cyprus’s political parties are making their final moves — and the established order is having to contend with two new forces that are reshaping the race in ways that are still difficult to predict.

DISY, AKEL and DIKO are sticking to a more traditional tempo, highlighting policy positions and parliamentary records. ELAM is leading on immigration and anti-LGBTQ stances.

ALMA is trying to steer the conversation back to corruption — the terrain on which Odysseas Michaelides and Irene Charalambides have chosen to fight.

EDEK, DIPA, the Ecologists and Volt are waging their own daily battles, while Direct Democracy moves to the rhythm of Fidias Panayiotou’s videos, whether they touch on his personal life or points of policy.

The traditional parties are now operating on more explicitly political footing. DISY is announcing daily policy positions, AKEL continues to lead on its social agenda, and DIKO is foregrounding the role it says it played in steering the country through the economic crisis — their core argument against newer formations such as ALMA and Direct Democracy, which lack a parliamentary track record.

Both new formations are, in their different ways, cutting horizontally across the party system. Their momentum, however, remains a variable that cannot be reliably assessed before polling day.

What is already clear is that they are creating instability on both the government and opposition sides, as well as across the ideological landscape of left, right and centre.

ALMA, which positions itself in the radical centre, has corruption as the main axis of its messaging and attacks across the full ideological spectrum. It frequently targets Annita Demetriou and DISY, while positioning itself as the next big centrist party — a project that poses an existential threat to DIKO, EDEK and DIPA. Its clash with AKEL is also well known, stemming both from the presence of Irene Charalambides on its list and from corruption references that drew a sharp response from AKEL Secretary General Stefanos Stefanou.

Pro-Russian and anti-Israeli

Direct Democracy, meanwhile, is harder to place. Its candidate list includes people of entirely different ideological persuasions, and how they will move after the election is an open question.

In his most recent intervention, Panayiotou focused on Israeli property purchases in Cyprus, pushing an anti-Israeli narrative and again targeting a left-leaning audience. Alternating between pro-Russian rhetoric and anti-Israeli messaging, he has been fishing for voters on the left and putting the brakes on the momentum AKEL had been building in these elections.

Ecologists rally behind Papadouris call for ‘clean, honest and green’ politics

Ecologists leader Stavros Papadouris used the movement’s final island-wide pre-election rally on Sunday at the Pallas Cinema to send a message of unity and call for a stronger political ecology ahead of May 24.

“Politics must be clean, honest and green,” he said, describing the Ecologists as the “only credible option” against “corruption, lack of meritocracy and policies leading to dead ends.”

He said the movement represents citizens who “have grown tired of grand words and hollow announcements,” and argued that political ecology is not “a choice of the moment” but a long-standing collective effort that has “for decades been warning, proposing and demanding.”

Papadouris cited energy poverty, the water crisis, the cost of living, a declining quality of life and the climate crisis as challenges facing Cyprus, describing them as “realities that affect citizens daily” — ones, he said, that “we are living through reckless construction and destructive development designed to serve the interests of the few, always on the backs of the many.”

He also pointed to the movement’s parliamentary record, noting that despite its small representation, it had achieved meaningful intervention.

According to figures he presented — drawn from a study by independent firm Oxygen, to be officially released on Tuesday — the Ecologists’ two MPs, Papadouris and Charalampos Theopemptou, submitted 203 bills, 357 own-initiative items and 282 parliamentary questions over the past five years.