There is still some time to go until the parliamentary elections, but speculative reports based on opinion polls have already been appearing. According to the latest poll conducted by Prime Consulting for Sigma TV, while the two biggest parties – Akel and Disy – remain ahead of the pack with very little separating them, the right-wing nationalists of Elam are now the third most popular choice, with a 12 per cent share of the support.

More impressive is the showing of Odysseas Michaelides’ Alma, which has only been alive for a few months as a movement and has no countrywide reach (it is essentially a one-man show), but was tipped to take 10 per cent of the vote if there were elections this week. The results were not good for the so-called parties of the ‘centre’ – Diko, Edek, Dipa, Greens – as their irreversible decline was confirmed.

These four parties are casualties of the disappearance of the Cyprus problem from the political sphere. Without it, they stand for nothing which is why they referred to themselves as the parties of the political centre – they were a bit of everything to everyone but took a ‘principled’ stand on the Cyprus problem which consisted of opposition to a federal settlement. This does not sell nowadays so the parties of the ‘centre’ have lost their identity and have nothing to offer supporters, apart from rusfeti.

The irony is that Diko, Edek and Dipa backed the candidacy of Nikos Christodoulides in the last presidential election but gained nothing from his success. If anything, they are seeing their support contract and the president moving steadily closer to Elam, as his re-election will depend on the backing of the right-wing nationalists rather than on the above-mentioned three, which together (nine per cent) cannot match Elam’s voting strength. They cannot even match it if they were joined by the Greens, which, like Edek and Dipa, might not even enter parliament.

In effect, the political system will eventually consist of the three main parties – Akel, Disy, Elam – with Disy being the moderate, centre-party. Akel will maintain its socialist ideology, while Elam will represent the nationalist Right, which for years was the domain of Edek and Diko. As for Alma, nobody knows what will happen and whether Michaelides will be able to turn it into a political party. He may have been a good auditor, but this does not necessarily make him a capable leader.

A shake-up of the political system leading to the disappearance of the small, opportunistic parties that have contributed very little to public life, except low-cost negativity on the Cyprus problem, is no bad thing. We desperately need change even if this only means a reduction in the number of parties in parliament.