MEP Theocharous expected to quit (Update)

DISY MEP Eleni Theocharous is poised to announce on Friday that she will be leaving the party, according to media reports.

Late on Thursday, Theocharous confirmed to Politis-news her intention, following several reports published during the day.

She told Politis-news she would be asking to meet with DISY boss Averof Neophytou to inform him of her decision.

Theocharous also said she would not be forming another party per se, but a political movement dedicated to “a proper solution for the Cyprus problem.”

She would not be surrendering her seat in the European Parliament.

A dissident hardliner who has repeatedly broken party ranks, Theocharous recently laid into the party leadership, accusing it of duplicity.

In a recent interview with daily Phileleftheros, she censured the DISY leadership for fostering a pro-solution campaign among Greek Cypriots, which she said was unrealistic given major divergences between the two sides in the ongoing reunification talks.

The DISY establishment, Theocharous had said at the time, “is deploying a pro-solution culture amid the pandemonium created by the messianic arrival on the political scene of [Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa] Akinci.”

She also charged her party colleagues of trying to smear her “because they see me as heretical and disobedient.”

In the same interview, Theocharous threw down the gauntlet, noting that if her party desires “ideological purity and Soviet-style consensus, they have but to expel me.”

In a statement she posted on her Facebook account last March, the MEP called for a new “Pancyprian politically subversive movement with the participation of everyone who puts the survival of the Cypriot republic, the saving of our country and society’s struggle to get back on its feet above everything else.”