The strongest communists in Europe: Accounting for AKEL's electoral success

What defines the Cypriot communist party, AKEL, as an exceptional case in Western Europe is the existing trend of its recent electoral fortune. While it is the oldest Cypriot party, with wide appeal to the Cypriot electorate in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, its more recent history defies the trends of West European communism. Since the boiling point of 1989, not only has it not suffered serious electoral decline but it is the only communist party to dominate the left in a Western European society, and its performance in municipal, presidential and, most of all, legislative elections has come to bear a pattern of continuous success. This electoral success can be accounted for by a combination of internal and external factors. Internal factors include ideological renewal, the party's response to European integration, the specific Cypriot issue of inter-communal rapprochement, and organizational issues. External factors concern the domestic political arena in which AKEL competes with other actors, and the Cypriot class structure from which AKEL draws its support. The ideological, programmatic and organizational renewal of the party and the strategy of relying less on theory and more on activism are the main elements that allowed AKEL to remain an important part of Cypriot politics.