To understand the rise of ELAM, we must first look at the rise and fall of its Golden Dawn forefathers across the Levantine Sea in Greece. The movement, founded in 1980 by Nikolaos Michaloliakos, has been accused of adopting Nazi iconography and encouraging violence against immigrants and progressives. Indeed, the party's flag, a black symbol on a dark red banner, is eerily reminiscent of the swastika adopted by Adolf Hitler. 

Golden Dawn reached its electoral zenith in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the biting austerity that followed the Greek Debt Crisis. The party won 7% of the vote in the Greek parliamentary elections in 2012 and over 9% in the European Parliament elections of 2014. The rise of Golden Dawn during the period following the tax rises and welfare cuts that marked Greece’s early 2010s is unsurprising. Extremism prospers in poverty and hardship; finding those to blame when your government fails you is an addictive, if yet corrosive, tonic. 

The party was banned in late 2020 after a thorough investigation into the leadership, following the murder of pro-immigration rapper Pavlos Fyssas, found that Golden Dawn  "MPs engaged in domestic terrorism under the mask of operating as a political party". Across the waters in Cyprus, the inherited tradition of ultra-nationalism continues to grow in strength. ELAM's leader and founder, Christos Christou, was an active member of Golden Dawn while studying in Greece, and on his return to his homeland, he set up the nascent party as 'Golden Dawn: Cypriot Kernel'.

In May 2012, newspapers reported that a National Guard officer, himself a member of ELAM, had been arrested for training fellow members how to use military mortars. Just four years later, the party had moved beyond the extremist fringe and into the Cypriot parliament, winning two seats on nearly four percent of the vote. Five years after that, its vote share surged to almost seven percent as it doubled its number of seats. During this period the party continued to operate on Cyprus's political fringes, largely ignored by the two dominant parties: the centre-right Democratic Rally (DISY) and the communist Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL).

However, the past few years have seen the party's influence and notoriety grow. In 2023, the party walked out of a minute's silence for the 500 migrants who died in the Pylos disaster. Twelve months later, it won its first seat in the European Parliament with just over eleven percent of the vote. ELAM's popularity was bolstered by a rise in asylum applications following the Israel-Hamas war and the subsequent conflicts in Lebanon. Immigration consequently became one of the foremost issues in the country, and, as in our own country, the far-right weaponised the issue to make electoral gains.

ELAM's reputation was burnished further still when the vice-president of the centre-right DISY defected to stand on the far-right party's list for the European elections. The move was seen as an important turning point for ELAM, further establishing themselves within the political mainstream and shifting the Overton Window.

On Sunday, ELAM took another step forward, again doubling its number of MPs in the Cypriot legislature to eight. In doing so, they replaced the centrist DIKO as the third-largest party for the first time since 1981. The result also means that the current Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulides, will likely have to court the far-right should he seek re-election in 2028. The president, who holds executive power in the Cypriot political system, has previously been accused of wooing ELAM through the appointment of sympathetic politicians to his cabinet and by adopting a hard-line stance on immigration.

Manfred Weber, the head of the centre-right European People's Party in the European Parliament, has previously warned Christodoulides that further integration with the Cypriot far-right would make it "impossible for him to continue to be accepted within the European centre-right". Professor Faustmann of the University of Nicosia has dismissed the group as "kindergarten fascists" but has warned that its increased strength means the president "will have to cater to them". Worryingly, the president has refused to reject the idea of collaboration with ELAM, raising the prospect that a party born out of neo-Nazism could play a genuine role in shaping policy in Nicosia.

The shifting of the Overton Window in Cyprus, and the subsequent policy drag that comes from the advances of a far-right party, are a warning to the United Kingdom. In the past couple of years, we have seen Reform UK's rising popularity shift the gravitational centre of British politics further and further to the right. Now, the emergence of Restore Britain under Rupert Lowe threatens to drag our politics further still towards intolerance and prejudice in a similar way. Fortunately, there are still three years before the next general election here in the UK for those on the other side of the political divide to learn the lessons being shown to us around the world.