Black shirts, blue souls: the Elam-isation of Cypriot politics

A few days ago, Andreas Papacharalambous, former mayor of Strovolos and apparently the president’s favourite author, announced he was joining the far-right Elam. After ditching Disy to back Christodoulides in 2023, he has finally found his natural habitat and now appears as Elam’s hand-picked ‘distinguished’ candidate and its gem for the 2026 parliamentary elections, in a party long linked to Greece’s now-banned Golden Dawn.

With few evident achievements but many followers on social media, Papacharalambous is one of those politicians who fail elsewhere and then find a vocation under Elam’s banner, scrambling for relevance while preaching a ‘clean course and a clear conscience’. Clean, except his municipality drew repeated complaints over cleanliness at the time. His talk of a ‘blue soul’, at a book presentation last May where President Nikos Christodoulides delivered remarks, is not poetry but a standard nationalist signal towards ‘mother Greece’.

This ‘clean course’, in turn, fits what appears to be Elam’s wider strategy: to project a break with Golden Dawn and to cast itself as the ‘other right’. New gloss, same substance; it remains a dangerously extremist and populist project.

Beyond these rebranding efforts, the European climate tilts the field. For over a decade, the far right has marched across the continent, heirs to an ideology that once plunged the continent into darkness. Against that backdrop, Elam now polls as a ‘third force’ in Cyprus, while the mainstream looks on, unable or unwilling to confront the plague infecting the island’s democracy.

Little wonder the ground is fertile. The deterioration in living standards, the 2013 haircut, the ‘golden passports’ and a series of scandals drained trust and left a vacuum that Elam stepped into, styling itself as the protector of the ‘pure people’ against the ‘corrupt elites’. Many angry voters mistook the pose for refuge.

However, the Cyprus problem remains the party’s main fuel. The unresolved conflict lets them cry ‘traitors’, stoke fear of Turkey and pose as the nation’s only guardians. Each breakdown in negotiations feeds the narrative, keeping alive the easiest and most dangerous tool for harvesting votes.

From there, the logic broadens into the Elam-isation of politics. On the Cyprus Problem and migration, mainstream parties rebadge Elam’s agenda as ‘patriotism’ to win back voters, making Elam the reference point and easing the quiet normalisation of extremism.

Alongside that, a culture war completes the picture. With support from parts of the Church, migrants, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are cast as existential threats, dragging debate away from bread-and-butter issues and towards easy scapegoats. Why confront the oligarchy when it is simpler to point at the refugee?

Hence the warning. If this drift is treated as normal, we have already lost. Elam is already in parliament and, barring a shock, looks well placed to grow in 2026, deepening the infection at the core of democracy.

After all, the intent was never hidden. In a 2013 anniversary address, Elam’s party leader said: ‘To those who call us terrorists, we answer that we are Greek nationalists and we will do whatever it takes to help the country. Our ideas are like fire and will spread.’

All the while, the traditional parties refused to listen. And now they are powerless to stop Elam’s rise, in part because they lack political courage, in part because the vacuum is of their own making, in part because they echo the same rhetoric, and in part because some within their ranks appear to exhibit ‘crypto-Elam’ tendencies.