Direct Democracy Cyprus

Direct Democracy Cyprus Άμεση Δημοκρατία Κύπρου Ámesi Dimokratía Kýprou
President	Fidias Panayiotou
Founder	Fidias Panayiotou
Founded	16 October 2025; 8 months ago (2025-10-16)
Legalised	27 February 2026; 3 months ago (2026-02-27)
European Parliament group	Non-Inscrits
Colours	Dark blue   Orange
House of Representatives	4 / 56
European Parliament	1 / 6
Municipal Councils	0 / 443
Politics of Cyprus Political parties Elections

Direct Democracy Cyprus (Greek: Άμεση Δημοκρατία Κύπρου, romanized: Ámesi Dimokratía Kýprou) is a political party in Cyprus established by YouTuber and MEP Fidias Panayiotou.^[1]

Initially declared "Direct Democracy" on 16 October 2025, the party was legally founded on 27 February 2026, under the name "Direct Democracy Cyprus".^[2][3]

The “Agorà” application

The “Agorà” App (meaning “shop” or "marketplace" in modern Greek, also "place of public discussion" in ancient Greek) is the application used by the party supporters to vote on parliamentary issues.

This working app^[4] can be seen by everyone around the world, and in it the Cypriot citizens (by showing their police ID) have the right to vote and indicate to their representative what they want him to vote for. In this way, every parliamentary representative is transformed into a Trojan horse of direct democracy, within a parliamentary environment.^[5] The ultimate goal of such representatives is to become the majority in parliaments and thus transform the widespread political regime of parliamentarism into (direct) democracy.

This is not the first attempt to establish direct democracy into a parliament via a similar "Trojan Horse" system, with the first one being IserveU.^[6] This idea was also tried,^[7] under the name pirategov, in the Pirate Party of Greece from 19 June 2012 until 16 December 2012.^[8]. There is also the Russian Party of Direct Democracy that was founded in 2020 and several other attempts in the List of direct democracy parties.

Between 12 and 14 March 2026, over 16,000 verified Cypriot citizens voted in the app to determine the party's 56 candidates for the 2026 Cypriot parliamentary elections.^[9] Between 19 and 21 March 2026, elections were held to determine the party's president, with Fidias Panayiotou receiving 56.79% of the vote. Diana Constantinides, who received 27.26%, was appointed vice-president.^[10] At the elections, ADK elected 4 MPs and received over 20,000 votes.

Stances

The party supports direct democracy and e-democracy.^[11]

Criticism for betraying the principles

The four elected members of the party in the Cypriot parliament are accused of betraying Direct Democracy principles, because their first action was to vote for the president of the parliement without asking the Agora App, and because they deny to put themselves in a digital revocability scheme.^[12] The members apologized in the official podcast of direct democracy party, but the reaction of the people was negative, as shown in the comments in that podcast.^[13]

Electoral results

References