Nicos Anastasiades

Nicos Anastasiades (born September 27, 1946, Pera Pedi, Cyprus) is a Greek Cypriot politician who was president of Cyprus (2013–23) and head of the centre-right Democratic Rally party (1997–2013).

Anastasiades was a native of the village of Pera Pedi near Limassol. He studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, then studied shipping law at the University of London, and afterward returned to Cyprus, where he opened a law firm specializing in commercial law in 1972. He entered politics as a founding member of Democratic Rally, a Christian democratic party, in 1976 and served as secretary of Limassol district in the party’s youth wing. In 1981 Anastasiades was elected to the first of six terms in the Cypriot House of Representatives. Advancing through the ranks of Democratic Rally, he became the party’s president in 1997.

In 1995 Anastasiades was appointed to the National Council, which was tasked with advising the Cypriot president on matters relating to the partition between the Greek and Turkish sections of Cyprus. Anastasiades supported an unpopular United Nations proposal, known as the Annan plan, for reunification, drawing some opposition even from within his own party. The plan passed a referendum in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but it was rejected by the voters of the Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus in 2004.

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In 2012 Anastasiades announced his candidacy for the Cypriot presidential election scheduled for the following year. The issue that dominated all others during the election campaign was Cyprus’s ongoing financial trouble, which was part of the broader euro-zone debt crisis and reached a high state of urgency in June 2012 when the restructuring of Greek debt inflicted massive losses on the two largest Cypriot banks, Laiki Bank and Bank of Cyprus. While campaigning, Anastasiades accused the incumbent communist government led by Dimitris Christofias of mismanagement of the Cypriot financial sector and criticized its apparent reluctance to accept the banking reforms and austerity measures requested by the European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and European Central Bank in exchange for a bailout.

On February 24, 2013, Anastasiades defeated Stavros Malas of the communist Progressive Party of the Working People with more than 57 percent of the vote in a runoff. The margin of victory was widely seen as delivering a mandate to implement the measures necessary to secure a financial rescue. Outside Cyprus, the election of Anastasiades was enthusiastically received by European officials exasperated by what they saw as Christofias’s intransigence. Once elected, Anastasiades repeated his pledge to work together with European leaders for a quick agreement.

After weeks of negotiations, Anastasiades agreed in March to terms for a bailout package that included €10 billion (about $13 billion) in loans and required an estimated contribution of €7 billion (about $9 billion) from Cyprus. The agreement called for the closure of Laiki and the restructuring of Bank of Cyprus. Most controversially, it called for part of the Cypriot contribution to be raised by confiscating up to 60 percent of depositors’ holdings above €100,000 (about $130,000) in the two banks, inflicting heavy financial losses on Cypriots as well as foreign nationals using the bank for offshore savings. The so-called “bail-in” model, requiring a large contribution to the bailout package from the beneficiary, stoked fears of a bank run. The government’s effective management of capital controls, however, revived the country’s banking system, and Cyprus was able to exit the bailout in 2016.

In an effort to offset the losses by foreign nationals after the bailout deal and stimulate foreign direct investment, Anastasiades’s government implemented changes in 2013 that would make it easier for investors to become citizens. The changes, often referred to as citizenship-by-investment (CBI), allowed foreign investors to attain Cypriot (and thereby EU) citizenship within months if they invested 2.5 million euros in Cypriot real estate, finance, or business. The deal was particularly attractive to wealthy foreign nationals who sought access to the benefits of EU citizenship.

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Meanwhile, Anastasiades renewed reunification talks with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 2015. His cordial relationship with his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Mustafa Akıncı, offered hope that an agreement might be reached, and talks continued on and off until July 2017, when the two parties were unable to agree on issues of power sharing and on the security arrangements for Turkish Cypriots. During his campaign for reelection in 2018, Anastasiades made clear his intention to continue pursuing a deal for reunification. He and Malas, who also favoured further reunification negotiations, won the first round of voting. Anastasiades won the runoff, which was largely credited to his handling of the country’s economic crisis.

During his second term as president, Anastasiades engaged in efforts with Akıncı to restart formal negotiations, although heightened international tensions over maritime natural gas claims took precedence. Turkey, which insisted that Cyprus coordinate with the TRNC and with Turkey in the management of these resources, responded to Cyprus’s unilateral exploration activities with its own warship-escorted surveys. Anastasiades asserted that the natural gas deposits fell fully under Greek Cypriot sovereignty according to existing international delimitations, although he offered to share revenue with the TRNC on Greek Cypriot terms.

Much of Anastasiades’s second term was overshadowed by allegations of corruption. By the end of the 2010s, it was revealed that oversight of the CBI program had been particularly lax. Government officials—and Anastasiades’s former law firm—had facilitated citizenship for applicants suspected of crimes such as money laundering. The program was ultimately suspended in November 2020. But scrutiny of Anastasiades only increased in 2021 after a trove of leaked documents pertaining to offshore finance, known as the Pandora Papers, raised concerns that his former law firm had itself engaged in money laundering.