Feidias Psaras
Mouths were agape. With nearly one fifth of the vote, the highest share of votes secured by an independent candidate for such a post, Cyprus had elected a TikToker to be one of the six Cypriot MEPs. In a simple gray t-shirt, Fidias Panayiotou read out his victory speech from a crumpled piece of paper before the vote was fully over. ‘Today is a historic day. Not only for Cyprus, but perhaps for the entire world’, he declared.
Since the start of its European Union membership, Cyprus had sustained a reputation for unseriousness, marked by a repeated failure to solve the Cyprus problem, consistently poor rankings on environmental matters in the EU, and numerous corruption scandals. This raises the question: was this a genuinely pivotal moment, or the nail in the coffin of Cyprus’s reputation in the EU?
Over the course of the two months, Fidias used his social media platforms, on which he had amassed millions of followers, to spread his political message. Namely, he talked about how he didn’t have any policies to speak of, and that he was running because he believed that what mattered, and what was lacking in the current political scene, was that he truly cared about the people of Cyprus and would go to all lengths to represent them. The latter has long become a demagogic cliché; the former is much less common. A quick sift through public appearances during the lead-up drives the point home. In one of his podcast episodes, Fidias discusses the need for schooling reform, claiming that schools are prisons and that we need to diversify modes of education. The kinds of reforms he suggests, however, showcase his elementary understanding of these institutions and their resource limitation.
Long-time fans, despite mostly being under the legal voting age, were fervent supporters of the political foray and were convinced of its success. To the uninitiated in matters of internet culture, the surprise came from the fact that this figure, a strange kind of ‘e-celebrity’ who was non-existent in the island’s political landscape prior to the two-month lead-up to July, was able to override decades-old party dogmatisms. To those people young enough to be on social media but not so much so as to be consistently drawn to Fidias’s content, the surprise came from a different angle. Fidias had risen to fame through a unique brand of Mr. Beast-like stuntsmanship: his videos featured him running barefoot through 21 km of snow, staying at an airport for a week and traveling across Japan by freeloading on the Shinkansen. Fidias had spent one sixth of 2022 camping outside Twitter Headquarters just to get a hug from Elon Musk. What did any of this have to do with being an MEP? With no prior training or experience in the field, and no coherent stance on domestic issues, not to mention highly technocratic ones of EU trade and regulatory policy, how was Fidias ever able to convince the people he could effectively represent them?
In fact, Fidias’s shortcomings were what got him elected. Although his talent for captivating audiences and his high-outreach platforms were obvious beforehand, his lack of policies meant that he avoided being placed anywhere within the political spectrum. And during a time of erosion in the public trust toward the heretofore mainstage political party, spurred most recently by blatant corruption scandals, a growing demographic yearned for a new political formation. They were captured just as much by Feidias’s promise as by his presentation; someone who had borne out the worst public abasements on screen for the world to watch, who spoke in the simple, at times broken Cypriot dialect that so many others hid in public appearances, who wore plain t-shirts to television interviews, Fidias couldn’t even be likened to the devil you knew. He was just a guy you knew.. Far from being charismatic by the traditional standards, Fidias’s clumsiness, his passionate stuttering and his unashamed admission of something as absurd as having no policies came off as strangely endearing for a large portion of an audience that didn’t know who to trust anymore.
But the slap in the face dealt to the main political parties of Cyprus was only in part a conscious statement by voters. The people who voted for Fidias because of his refusal to politically classify himself did so in part as a rejection of old party politics, but also because they found comfort in the naivete that it stemmed from. The country lacks civic engagement; in a 2020 survey, 38% of Cypriot respondents, the fourth smallest percentage, reported feeling like they were informed about Civil Society Organisations whose issues matter to them and just 11% had taken part in public consultations happening in their area, both percentages being the fourth among the 27 Member States. Moreover, 31% cited that actions of such CSOs did not impact them at all, the eighth highest in the Union. It makes sense then, for such an under-informed and disillusioned voter base to seek refuge in something they can identify with.
On the other hand, Fidias’s nomination reveals a more unsettling truth about our citizens’ relationship to the EU. While Belgium and Luxembourg might hover at around a 90% voter turnout, countries like Croatia and Lithuania exhibited voter turnout in the 20s and 30s, even during an election year that has had the largest overall voter turnout in three decades. The EU is a federal system that bridges economic and legal gaps between countries, but the historic, cultural, linguistic and civic ones still remain. And to many, this superstructure that determines so much of their lives is a black box; a set of passionless institutions filled with faceless technocrats. To an extent, this is also true at the national level. It’s easier to attribute bus punctuality and cleanliness of sidewalks to good municipal organization than it is to assess the net impact of national welfare policies.
Fidias’s success reveals a lot about what we need to work on moving forward. For one, it clearly illustrates the importance of modernizing strategies and channels of outreach. It reveals how political parties in Cyprus struggle to maintain trustworthiness among voters, as well as how those voters themselves are not sufficiently politically literate due to an undernourished educational and civic sector. Worryingly, it also highlights how precarious the democratic model is when it comes to EU politics. In any case, let’s hope that the Fidias phenomenon does more harm than good.