He may have stopped being president two-and-a-half years ago and leader of Disy more than 10 years ago but Nicos Anastasiades seems incapable of accepting that his political career is over, which means coming to terms with retirement. He is still striving for political relevance and acting as if he personally owns Disy, issuing orders and diktats to the party leadership and publicly criticising it because it, quite rightly ignores them.

Because his latest missive to party leader Annita Demetriou was not forwarded to all members of the political bureau, as he had demanded, he leaked it to the press. Anastasiades’ longstanding complaint is that Disy does not defend the work of his government, which “saved the bankrupt state” nor does it mention “all those important achievements that contributed to the rebirth of the Cyprus Republic.” He also expressed “great disappointment over Disy’s distancing from the achievements of the 10-year Anastasiades-Disy administration.”

The audacity of the man knows no bounds. The idea that Disy should be praising the achievements of Anastasiades’ government two-and-a-half years after he left office is absurd. Parties provide answers and solutions to problems facing society now and do not exist to market what happened years ago because this satisfies the vanity of a former president. The fact is that Disy has a lot more pressing problems to deal with than defending Anastasiades’ dubious legacy.

Disy is plagued by the divisions that were an indisputable achievement of Anastasiades, who worked against the party’s candidate in the last presidential election to help his protégé win. And while Demetriou is working to keep a deeply divided party together, she has Anastasiades moaning because the party is not defending his administration’s great achievements, such as the golden passports and the LNG terminal in Vasiliko.

His other gripe relates to the Cyprus problem, accusing Demetriou of “adopting the Turkish narrative,” about the collapse of the talks at Crans Montana. He attached an article that “restores the truth” about what happened. Anastasiades torpedoed the best opportunity for a settlement of the Cyprus problem because he was more interested in his re-election, and introduced the two-state solution in the Cyprus process by proposing this to Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Crans Montana.

This is Turkey’s narrative that we should not adopt. Not because it is untrue, but because Anastasiades does not want to be remembered for paving the way for finalising partition. The irony is that he advocated partition in meetings with many Greek Cypriots, including the late Archbishop Chrysostomos, before he proposed this to Cavusoglu, so the Turkish narrative is not necessarily wrong. Anastasiades was economical with the truth so often during his presidency how could anyone accept his narratives about anything?

Anastasiades must accept that his political career is over and he must allow the new Disy leadership to do its job. The party does not belong to him and he would do well to follow the example set by the man he claims to be his ‘political father.’ When Glafcos Clerides stepped down from the party presidency, he went home and never interfered in Disy because he knew his time was over and the party did not belong to him, even though he was its founder.