The specter of communism haunts election in Cyprus

NICOSIA, Cyprus - The warnings have been dire: Be careful how you vote today, Cypriot mobile-phone users are told by text message, or you could end up with a Stalinist leader and the hammer and sickle as a national emblem.

The texting campaign has stirred up a political storm and many have condemned it as scaremongering. But the truth is that today, Cyprus could become a rarity among its European Union partners by electing a communist-rooted president.

Dimitris Christofias heads AKEL, a party with Leninist roots and a hammer - albeit without the sickle - as its symbol. He is in a neck-and-neck race with conservative former Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides for the presidency of this ethnically divided island.

The two were within fractions of a percentage point in the Feb. 17 first round, which unexpectedly knocked out incumbent Tassos Papadopoulos, and few pollsters would risk predicting which way Cypriots will vote.

With the race so close, Christofias' background is being dragged to the fore.

"Hitler has fallen, it's Stalin's turn," read one of dozens of text messages sent over the last few days. "Why did Castro resign after 50 years as president of a communist country? Because a position has opened up in Cyprus," read another.

But the Christofias camp has been at pains to distance the Soviet-educated 61-year-old history professor from his communist image. He is in fact a "progressive socialist," they say, and some of his policies are free-market.

Any assumptions about Christofias advocating purely communist policies would be far from the truth, analysts say.

"Christofias is a pragmatic social democrat. . . . He's not even anticapitalist," said Hubert Faustmann, associate professor of international relations at Nicosia University. "He might raise more than one eyebrow at the EU in the beginning, but he's not what they will have in mind when they hear 'communist.' "