By Andreas Cosma
On October 16, 2025 Cypriot Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Fidias Panayiotou took to his social media accounts to make the “biggest announcement of his life, the creation of a new political party in Cyprus to run in the 2026 Parliamentary elections.
The central principle defining Panayiotou’s announced party, inspiring even its name, is the concept of Direct Democracy, with the use of a mobile application allowing people to vote for the party’s candidates for elections, as well as for their actions while in office.
This innovation has been touted as an entirely new concept by Panayiotou in his announcement and subsequent interviews.
The Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network (CIReN) examined Panayiotou’s claim of the party presenting an entirely new and untested model, comparing it to previous applications of this concept to illustrate how the idea may not be as innovative as its being presented.
The Claim
In promoting the launch of his new venture, the Direct Democracy party, Fidias Panayiotou has on several occasions highlighted the novel nature of the party.
In his social media post on October 16th announcing the party, Panayiotou claimed that this has “never been done before”, and highlighted how this model if successful “could become in a way the beginning for a fairer future not only in Cyprus but also in the rest of the world”.
In an interview with the podcast NetcastZone uploaded on October 20th, Panayiotou reiterated these claims, stating that “it’s difficult to imagine this thing because it has never been done before”, and claimed that if the model was successful it could be “copy-pasted and applied in other countries with elections” comparing it to the model of the Volt Europe party, a transnational pro-European and federalist movement with branches in several countries, including Cyprus.
The facts
The Direct Democracy party announced by Fidias Panayiotou via his social media platforms has as its key feature the increased importance placed on common supporters of the party who will vote to select the party’s candidates for elections, as well as key policy points and decisions via a mobile application.
The application, named Agorà was added to the Google Play and Apple App stores in early 2025, and is touted in its listings as a “groundbreaking platform inspired by the principles of openness, transparency, and community participation” as well as “the future of direct democracy.”
What Panayiotou has highlighted several times in his videos, often in an attempt to temper expectations regarding the party, and counter any criticisms, is the novel nature of this approach. He claimed on several occasions that “this has never been done before.”
A novel concept?
There have been several previous notable attempts at enshrining principles of direct democracy into political parties, and one very notable European example of a party using for over a decade platforms almost identical to the one proposed by Panayiotou for their decision-making both in selecting candidates and key decisions.
In Italy, in the early 2010s, the “Five Star Movement” party, founded by activist and comedian Beppe Grillo, had utilised a custom online platform called Rousseau, in addition to other platforms for many of its important decisions.
Members registered on the Rousseau platform could vote on the party’s potential coalition agreements, select nominees for parliamentary elections as well as for local elections, and shape specific policies that the party’s members would take within the parliament.
Panayiotou does not appear to be unaware of the Five Star Movement, naming MEP’s from the party among those, who may join a potential party in the European Parliament he is involved in discussions to form during his interview with Netcast Zone, but making no mention of their own use of online platforms for voting .
In addition to the Five Star Movement, the global Pirate Party movement, an international grouping of parties that share a set of values and policies focused on civil rights in the digital age, have also strongly advocated for the application of principles of this called online direct democracy.
The approach advocated by these parties apply a theory called liquid democracy, whereby an electorate engages in collective-decision making via direct participation and dynamic representation, presenting a sort of hybrid of direct and representative democracy.
Parties linked to the group, who have successfully elected MP’s and MEP’s in several European countries, with the most prominent branches in the Czech Republic, Germany and Iceland, have also used software like LiquidFeedback to facilitate internal debate and policy creation within parties and branches.
Further afield, in Australia, the ‘Online Direct Democracy - (Empowering the People)’ party and another party named Flux presented experiments with online direct democracy and issue-based direct democracy, a similar system where voters are not obligated to vote on all issues but only those they are specifically concerned with.
Argentina's El Partido De La Red (The Net Party) was founded in 2012 with a major focus on principles of direct and digital democracy. The party created an open-source software package named DemocracyOS that acted as an online platform for democratic participation including determining the votes of congressmen as well as proposing new laws and voting on existing proposals.
While they have not introduced any significant changes to their party structure or policy proposals in this regard, the far-right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the French National Rally of Marine Le Pen have both advocated for introducing binding referendums at federal and national levels as ways of giving power back to the people and away from the elites of Brussels, Berlin or Paris.
How did these experiments pan out?
Three years after coming to power following the 2018 general election and their participation in two successive coalitions under Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte, the Five Star Movement parted ways with the Rousseau platform and its co-founding partner Davide Casaleggio that had set up the platform.
The split came after months of the Rousseau Association, who ran the platform complaining that the party owed it a reported EUR 450,000 in back payment. The association received the majority of its revenue from Five Star’s elected officials who paid it a EUR 300 monthly quota, which the association claimed many had stopped paying.
Panayiotou had claimed in his interview with Netcast Zone that he had spent “several tens of thousands” of his own money in developing the Agora application and suggested that a potential future way to cover these funds could be the introduction of a membership subscription fee for his party illustrating how he may not have considered the mounting costs of maintaining and promoting such a platform and the possible issues this could raise as in Five Star’s example.
Even during the times where Five Star’s collaboration with Rousseau was successful, there were still issues with the party’s model of online direct democracy.
In 2017, just after voting had finished via the platform for the party’s leadership elections, a hacker announced that they had broken into Rousseau and put its entire database on sale for 0.3 bitcoins (around 1,000 euros at the time).
The Rousseau system was also criticised for its lack of transparency, as Five-Star Movement only allowed independent observers to verify the regularity of the process for very few of the votes held on the platform.
Critics also claimed there was no guarantee of the user/voter’s anonymity to platform managers or that voters were only casting one ballot or were not being coerced to make particular votes or decisions.
While branches of the Pirate Party have achieved success in electing MPs and MEPs in some countries there remain divisions within the wider group regarding whether the parties should remain loyal to their anti-establishment status or adopt more traditional structures and methods of traditional parties when they achieve electoral success.
The Australian ‘Online Direct Democracy - (Empowering the People)’ and Flux parties ran in local and federal elections throughout the 2010s with no real success in electing candidates at any level with the former de-registered in 2020 and the latter dissolved in 2023.
Since its inception in 2013, El Partido de La Red has failed to win any legislative seats in the elections it contested, although the party’s use of its platform DemocracyOS helped it to successfully lobby the Buenos Aires legislature to adopt similar technology in implementing the platforms Demos and Participemos to allow some citizen participation in the city’s governance.
Fidias Panayiotou’s claim that his ‘Direct Democracy’ party and its use of a digital application for citizen participation in party decision making as well as decisions by elected officials of the party represents an entirely new concept with potential to inspire and spread further around the world is demonstrably false.
The previous history of the Five Star Movement in Italy with their Rousseau platform, the various instances of the Pirate Party globally as well as other parties in Australia and Argentina among others illustrate that this concept has been implemented previously in other countries.
The fact that Panayiotou consistently highlights the novel nature of the venture he proposed and his claim that it has “never been done before” is false. A very similar online platform has been in use by the Five Star Movement since the early 2010s in Italy, and it is unlikely that Panayiotou is unaware of it, as he is in contact with members of the party to form a new European political grouping at the European Parliament.
Panayiotou’s claim that “this could be the beginning of a new fairer future, perhaps not only for Cyprus, but also for the rest of the world” also appears to be false. The implementation of an online platform with principles of direct democracy is not in any way certain to provide a fairer future, as such platforms can cause issues relating to ownership, transparency, verification of votes, and financing.
CIReN’s project “Countering Falsehoods and Propaganda in Island States”
is supported by the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF). The sole responsibility for any content lies with the authors and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.