The Democratic Rally's reaction to the announcement about the findings on the "Mafia State" report was, if nothing else, confirmation of a pattern. It showed just how far above their own shadow certain people believe themselves to stand, and how much they've come to resemble the very people they claim to despise: the same people they used to accuse, not so long ago, of refusing to accept official findings. The Democratic Rally declared itself "convinced" by Anastasiades's answers, wondered aloud why the former President should be missing from the party's collective bodies, dredged up Mari once again for good measure, and quietly wrote the Progressive Party of the Working People out of the democratic camp altogether. Annita, meanwhile, extolled the Anastasiades government's "enormous achievements", choosing to ignore that, according to the Anti-Corruption Authority's own findings, the biggest legacy of that decade was the capture of state institutions and corruption baked into the system itself. Amid all this, she called, vaguely and in general terms, for the matters raised in the report to be looked into. Without laying a finger on the former President, even on the most obvious points.
For a while now, the Democratic Rally's leadership has struggled visibly to know what to do with that decade. The way it chose to play politics left the party wobbling between an attempted rebrand on one hand and a refusal to actually confront its own past on the other. It never seemed to grasp that the modernisation it kept banging on about could not happen without a clean break from everything that turned the country into a failed state. So it let Anastasiades's shadow hang permanently over the party. Sometimes through meetings that landed it in genuinely awkward positions, like Annita choosing to meet Nicos Anastasiades on the very day the European Parliament was putting Cyprus back in the dock over the Cyprus Confidential revelations, with explicit references to the former President. Sometimes by handing him a platform to weigh in on major decisions. And sometimes by turning him into the face of the "new" Democratic Rally, wheeling him out at the front of the election campaign. Always with the same reluctance to genuinely distance itself, not just from a decade that devalued the political system to the point of collapse, but above all from the man who led it. Even after the report, which formally and in detail documents the extent of the impunity and corruption of that government, Annita still felt the need to defend it, to go after those who criticised the Anastasiades government on the strength of the report's own conclusions, and to crow about its achievements. Practically merging her own image with the Anastasiades decade, and turning the new Democratic Rally into a straight continuation of the old.
As the announcement about the findings made clear, that decade continues to be a reference point for all the wrong reasons. Not so much because time keeps confirming how scandalous it was, but because every so often some new fact turns up to confirm it's not a parenthesis that's simply going to close. It carries on monopolising public debate with its scandals. And more than three years on, it's turning into a genuine fault line running through our political system and society: a dividing line between moral conduct and political amorality, between what we want to leave behind and the "new" Annita keeps promising.
The Democratic Rally was a central part of that government, and as such, it could never have cut itself off entirely from the Anastasiades decade. But no one could seriously pin the new leadership with the sins of that government, if Efthymios Diplaros, Harris Georgiades and Foteini Tsiridou hadn't rushed to defend the man who led it. Or if Annita had actually distanced herself from a decade in which collusion, the arrogance of power and sheer impunity ran riot. So it's genuinely baffling why she insists on tying the party to the man who is the clearest embodiment of a system society has come to equate with outright corruption. Why she insists on presenting that government as a proud chapter for the party, when it's obvious it's dead weight around its neck. Especially now it's plain that Anastasiades is serving interests that have nothing to do with the party's own, as his post-election comments made clear. How is she supposed to convince anyone she wants a solution to the Cyprus problem, when he never once voiced any disagreement with how Crans-Montana was handled, or with pushing a two-state solution? How is she supposed to convince anyone she'll take on corruption, when she couldn't find a single word to say about what's in the report's findings? And how is she supposed to convince anyone she's actually moving toward something new, when at no point has she separated her own position from the oldest guard of all?
That's precisely why, beyond her ability to put forward a clear political narrative, what will ultimately decide the Democratic Rally's path, and Annita's own, on the road to the presidential election is how the leadership handles the party's recent past, and above all the former President. Because whatever narrative she puts forward, however much gold dust she sprinkles about being new and unspoiled, none of it will ever be convincing unless she first breaks with the facts standing in the way of anything new. It's clear that the distance she keeps from Nicos Anastasiades will shape her political profile. And it's more than likely it will decide her political future too.
