THE ABSTENTION rate for Sunday’s parliamentary elections reached an all-time high of 21.3 per cent, a figure almost double that of the previous elections.
“Abstention is one of the winners,” said President Demetris Christofias adding that this “was not a healthy phenomenon” and authorities should correct the situation.
The numbers of those refusing to vote have climbed sharply from about 4 per cent in 2001, to more than 10 per cent in 2006 and then to more than 21 per cent for the current ones.
About 113,000 registered voters did not bother to vote while almost 5,000 submitted a blank ballot slip.
A further 20,000 of the 34,000 of those newly eligible to vote having turned 18 since the last elections did not even register.
In real terms then the abstention rate was actually closer to 25 per cent.
This means that in practice, a quarter of the population failed to register, turned in a blank ballot slip or else failed to show up to vote.
This places the two major parties’ actual percentage figures closer to 25 per cent for DISY and 24 per cent for AKEL.
From the actual pool of those who did vote, DISY got 34.27 per cent and AKEL 32.67.
There have been warning signs of increasing apathy for a few years now and even muted talk of action by authorities but, so far, little has actually been done.
In 2009, there was a 40 per cent abstention rate for the European parliament elections which was downplayed in its importance by the political leadership.
“The [importance of the] abstention rate for the European elections was underestimated,” said elections analyst Yiannis Mavris.
The European example “wasn’t such an accident and wasn’t explicable by the smaller importance of the elections,” Mavris said.
For Mavris, the phenomenally high abstention rate in both the current elections and the European ones marks a trend in increasing apathy and lack of participation.
“The fact that abstention doubled in five years is not a normal development: it is a clear indication of the crisis in politics and the political system which Cyprus now also faces,” said Mavris.
Particularly worrying is that the high percentage of abstentions among younger voters.
“It is clear that the most absentees are younger people who also display the least interest in politics,” said Eleni Marangou, the general manager for polling company Cymar.
An anecdote demonstrates this apathy.
A 26-year-old business man who spoke on condition of anonymity explained how he had planned to vote but he and his friends all went to Protaras for the weekend and after a night out drinking, their “plans changed”.
“I know I’m a part of the problem,” he said commenting on his abstention but “we were badly organised and I didn’t have a ride back to Nicosia where I’m supposed to vote.”
For the young businessman, going through the trouble of getting back to Nicosia – a taxi-ride which should have taken less than an hour – was enough for him to write off his vote.
Meanwhile, most parties have come out with statements about the abstention rate, most expressing the need to analyse and understand the reasons behind the increasing apathy.
What seems to be the case is that with younger voters failing to vote, the major parties are relying on “a smaller pool of voters who are more faithful to their party” as Mavris put it.
As the younger voters grow older, the core support for parties will grow smaller making the talk of political crisis for those in the politics business more personal.
