One of the biggest questions to emerge from the parliamentary elections is whether the "Sandy" affair affected Volt's result. Nobody can answer that with absolute certainty. Only qualitative research through focus groups and individual voter interviews could provide scientifically grounded answers, identifying within a sample the voters who changed their position. That is the only way to give an interpretation solid foundations. Electoral behaviour is a subject of political science, and the discipline has the tools, theories and schools of thought to examine it properly.
Scientific processes, however, take time. Nobody can wait for science to answer questions of this kind. The news cycle moves fast and public interest fades within days. Political analysts and journalists must meet the needs of an audience searching for explanations. Political leaderships must respond immediately: winners need to explain how effective their campaign was in order to capitalise on victory and consolidate their position, while the defeated look for explanations that ease their situation and do not force them to resign.
As a result, most political analysis is not grounded in scientific research but in rough interpretations of political and social phenomena. We give meaning to events, numbers and electoral results. The task of making sense of elections, through party meetings, journalistic pieces and media appearances, is an immediate way of explaining what happened. All of this must be stated plainly, as a matter of intellectual honesty. A commentator on political affairs has an obligation to acknowledge and to warn the public about the degree of validity of any given interpretation. We are all expressing an opinion, offering a reading, making meaning of events.
The Sandy affair landed like a bomb and generated enormous noise. It monopolised public attention for many days and it is impossible that it had no effect on the result. It brought votes to Volt and it drove voters away from the party. Nobody knows the precise numbers. The interpretation offered by Volt officials, that the party's poll ratings rose after the Sandy affair and then fell toward the end because the machinery of the traditional political forces kicked in, does not explain why Volt failed to enter parliament. There are parties with offices and paid staff in every district that also failed to win seats. No phenomenon is explained by one or two causes. Science abandoned single-cause explanations long ago. These things are always more complex.
What the Sandy affair did create was a significant problem of management. Party officials were forced to spend enormous energy explaining their position. From a posture of attack they found themselves on the defensive, called upon repeatedly to justify the party's stance. The affair did not develop as originally planned. There were denials, and ultimately a strong impression took hold that the story did not hold up.
The affair overshadowed the party's policy positions. For many days it became impossible to raise other issues that would have highlighted the party's rational, evidence-based character. Volt had, over the preceding period, managed to build a public image and a distinct political profile: a European party with science-based, moderate policy proposals, a voice of reason appealing to a specific segment of the population, people who have lived abroad and want to live in a modern Cyprus. The question is how those people received the revelation of the Sandy affair and how they followed its development. Did it reinforce Volt's rationalism and moderate character, or did it cloud the party's public image?
Volt became trapped in this affair, and the efforts of certain party officials to defend a story that was taking on water did nothing to help. The party's rationalism sitting alongside the irrationalism of some of its members was a glaring contradiction. Nor was the attempt by others to distance themselves partially convincing. Even now, the party has not publicly acknowledged the damage the Sandy affair caused. The elections are over and the result will not change. What matters now is the day after, and Volt's future. The stubbornness that several party officials continue to display is not a political virtue. Antigone's defiance of King Creon was, in the end, catastrophic.
