A week before the parliamentary elections, it’s unclear how much of a shock to the system they’ll turn out to be.

Disy and Akel remain by far the biggest parties, with middle-of-the-road Diko at historically low but still respectable figures. This won’t be as momentous an upheaval as, for instance, the rise of Reform and the Greens in the UK.

Still, there are three parties – Alma, Direct Democracy Cyprus and Volt, potentially adding up to 15 seats (out of 56) – that didn’t even exist in the previous parliamentary elections in 2021.

And of course there’s Fidias Panayiotou, founder of Direct Democracy, who seems to represent something new and disturbing, at least to some people.

He’s been called unserious and irresponsible, even a threat to democracy. Many seem to view him as a clown, like those ‘colourful’ (i.e. mentally unstable) characters who were always a fixture at – mostly presidential – elections, garnering a handful of protest votes.

Unlike them, however, Direct Democracy is showing the kind of support that would be enough to win several seats in the new parliament.

Leaving aside the merits of Fidias’ agenda, his main appeal lies in his disarming honesty about his own shortcomings, and a sense that he doesn’t deal in the usual hypocrisy.

His self-admitted ignorance is actually an asset. On the one hand, it’s shocking that a politician doesn’t know (as he apparently didn’t) what Unficyp is, or how the Green Line Regulation works.

On the other, most politicians’ air of feigned omniscience – aimed at establishing themselves as technocrats, part of the ‘expert class’ – is exactly what many voters find pompous and obnoxious about the whole system. 

Fidias is important not for who he is, but what he represents – a quixotic hope that politics can take place in a more honest and transparent way.

Everyone knows the system can’t be entirely replaced. Direct democracy works sometimes (in Switzerland, notably), but only as a supplement for specific issues.

Then again, when Fidias announced, for instance, that the Cyprus problem wasn’t a big priority for users of his Agora app, it resonated because it expressed something usually unsayable, that the Cyprus problem – which politicians love to drape themselves in, using it for cover and virtue-signalling – isn’t actually a big priority for most people.

Whatever happens in next Sunday’s elections, they reflect a growing dissatisfaction with systemic hypocrisy, and a call for transparency and plain speaking.

More and more people seem to be concluding that the cosy system of corruption, consensus, mediocrity and mutual back-scratching – all of it built around EU funding and the pious red herring of the Cyprus problem – is no longer fit for purpose.

What many voters want (and we could even include Elam voters here) are strong voices who are unafraid of controversy, and don’t just mouth the right platitudes or stick to the usual pieties. Hence the rise of truth-telling mavericks like Fidias and Odysseas Michaelides of Alma.

Again, this may not be a good thing. Not only are their promised solutions likely to be unrealistic, but the experience of other countries also shows that such figures often turn out to be narcissists and authoritarians.

Still, there may be a sense that, with so many earth-shaking issues around us – not just local politics, but everything from AI to climate change to looming recession and possible war – there’s a need for a new kind of politics, which essentially is the raison d’être of all three new parties.

One final point is the absence of horizontal voting, which might enable people to pick and choose charismatic individuals from different parties, or without party backing at all.

Horizontal voting is exactly how you vote for personalities over parties, which of course is exactly why the old guard never pushed for it.

If Fidias, Odysseas and their ilk manage to change electoral law in that way – opening the door for more independent voices to emerge in the future – that really would be a shock to the system.