Four candidates will be standing in the elections of the leadership of Edek on September 5. The elections were made necessary by the resignation of party leader Nicos Anastasiou, after the humiliating showing in last May’s parliamentary election, in which Edek, for the first time in its history, failed to win a single seat.

Anastasiou had been party leader for less than a year, having taken over after the turbulent ten-year leadership of Dr Marinos Sizopoulos, who left the party divided and weakened. There were mass walkouts and some acrimonious public rows with senior party members during Sizopoulos’ time in charge.

Meanwhile, Sizopoulos is currently under investigation in connection with a property transaction involving an Iraqi national seeking Cypriot citizenship.

Anastasiou inherited a party in complete disarray and the fact that Edek secured a little over 3 per cent of the vote in May’s election should be considered a success under the circumstances. There are currently four candidates for the leadership, all promising to unite the party, revive it and give it the direction it had lost in the last decade of continuous internal strife.

Edek’s problems, and most of the so-called centre parties to a large extent go much deeper. They do not really stand for anything. Edek had for decades survived on the cult of the leader, existing as the personal vehicle of the firebrand Dr Vassos Lyssarides and his hard line, uncompromising, but ultimately vacuous, rhetoric on the Cyprus problem. Yiannakis Omirou, who succeeded him, tried to re-position the party, but he was eventually replaced by Sizopoulos, who reverted to Lyssarides’ antiquated Cyprus problem rhetoric.

The time when parties defined themselves exclusively by their stance on the Cyprus issue is over, even though parties like Edek have not yet realised it. Rejectionist parties like Euroko, Solidarity, Nei Orizontes have disappeared, with Elam now the undisputed leader of the Cyprus problem hardliners. Without the national issue, Edek does not really stand for anything.

The candidates standing for the leadership, apart from pledging to unite the party, say the same things that all other parties talk about – the high cost of living, housing, job creation and social inequality. In what way is Edek different from Akel, Diko, Elam, Direct Democracy on economic and social issues? All these parties, and to an extent Disy, embrace the same populist ideas, only Alma with its anti-corruption rhetoric carving out a different identity.    

What will be Edek’s new identity after September 5? It will probably maintain the ‘social democrats’ label but this could as easily apply to most of the other parties. The new leadership may be fighting a losing battle in its attempt to revive the party, which seems to belong to a bygone era, an era in which the leader was the party.