The Committee on Congresses and the Rehabilitation of the Membership Register, the five-member Edek body set up to oversee two upcoming party congresses, has pushed back against suggestions it is working against the party's own institutions, while expressing hope that leader Nikos Anastasiou will withdraw his resignation.
In a statement issued on Wednesday after a meeting attended by committee members Diomidis Diomidous, Michalis Koutalianos, Pavlos Michail and Nikos Nikolaidis, the committee said it felt sorrow and disappointment over Anastasiou's resignation as party president and hoped he would reconsider. It stressed the importance of absolute respect for institutional procedures and decisions, as well as for every provision of the party's statutes.
According to the Cyprus News Agency (CNA), the committee said that should Anastasiou not reconsider, and taking into account what it described as the extremely difficult moment the party is going through, it considers it of the utmost importance that both the party's institutional procedures and decisions and every provision of its statutes receive absolute respect.
The committee referred to the mandate set for it by the party's Extraordinary Congress, saying it considers it self-evident, on any good-faith reading, that its formation and operation are in no way in conflict or confrontation with the party's institutional bodies or any provision of its statutes. It added that it will duly keep both the Political Bureau and the Central Committee informed of the progress of its work, its decisions and its output. The committee said it was confident that all party members, guided by their love for Edek's historic movement, will rise to the occasion and safeguard the party's democratic processes, its legality and its prospects for rebuilding.
Nikolaidis: 'unacceptable and unprecedented'
Separately, Nikos Nikolaidis, a member of the five-member committee, levelled sharp criticism at Edek's leadership group, accusing it of attempting to falsify the decisions taken by the party's Extraordinary Congress of 5 July 2026.
In a social media post, Nikolaidis described recent events within Edek as "unacceptable and unprecedented," arguing that what he called the well-known leadership group is attempting, arbitrarily and unlawfully, to distort the decisions of the 5 July extraordinary electoral congress and to continue the same policies that led the party to collapse.
He noted that following Edek's heavy defeat in the parliamentary elections, the Extraordinary Congress had opened a window of optimism for the party, with the grassroots sending what he called a categorical and unambiguous message that Edek needed to change, enter a new era, and definitively leave behind the political practices that had led to its numerical and political decline.
According to Nikolaidis, the congress's decisions were specific: lifting all expulsions carried out since 2015, rehabilitating the membership register, holding a Statutory Congress in October and an Electoral Congress in December, conducting a financial audit, restructuring the party organisationally, and assigning a five-member committee, under the party president, responsibility for cleaning up the register and planning the two congresses.
However, he alleged that eight days after the congress, during a session of the Political Bureau, the same leadership group first disputed the legality of the decisions and then drafted what he called a one-page set of "minutes" of the congress, misrepresenting, in his view, what had actually been decided. He said powers relating to the two congresses, the drawing up of a list of proposed statutory changes and the rehabilitation of the membership register had been stripped from the five-member committee, which he said effectively annulled a committee that had itself been a decision of the congress. He further alleged that the decision on a financial audit had been amended to add the condition that it would take place only if the party's finances allowed it.
Nikolaidis called on Edek members to ask themselves who benefits, and why, from blocking the implementation of the congress's decisions, the rehabilitation of the membership register, the reinstatement of what he described as thousands of expelled members, the proposed statutory changes and the financial audit. He closed with a message to the party's leadership group, saying times have changed and that the manoeuvres of the last ten years no longer work, adding that party members will protect democracy within Edek and safeguard its path toward rehabilitation and renewal.
Source: CNA
