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| - Cyprus voters went to the polls Sunday for parliamentary elections amid simmering public anger over the "golden passports" corruption scandal on the Mediterranean island. Ultra-nationalists looking to exploit the anti-establishment mood have also played on concerns over migration, another hot-button issue for the European Union's most easterly member state. A record 658 candidates, representing 15 parties, are vying for 56 seats in parliament before an electorate of more than 550,000. The election is limited to government-held areas, excluding the northern third of the island where a breakaway Turkish Cypriot state holds sway. Polling stations are scheduled to close at 6 pm (1500 GMT). "There is a very unhappy electorate fed up with the political elite and parliament," said Hubert Faustmann, professor of history and political science at the University of Nicosia. "People are fed up with corruption in public life." In a column in the English-language Cyprus Mail under the headline "From corruption to an honest state", Achilleas Demetriades called for a vote for reforms and change. "New coalitions and new policies are necessary," he wrote. "The autocratic approach and arrogance must be replaced with modern approaches to politics." Last November, Cyprus dropped its controversial passport-for-investment scheme after Al Jazeera aired a documentary showing reporters posing as fixers for a Chinese businessman seeking a Cyprus passport despite having a criminal record. Parliament was at the centre of the furore after speaker Demetris Syllouris and an opposition lawmaker were secretly filmed allegedly trying to facilitate the passport for the fugitive investor. They later resigned, although both insisted they were innocent of any wrongdoing. The other issue is migration, as Cyprus has the highest per capita number of first-time asylum seekers in the 27-member bloc, according to the Eurostat statistics agency. The government has said Cyprus is in a "state of emergency" due to migrant streams from war-torn Syria and elsewhere. Unusually for Cyprus, the decades-old division between the island's Greek and Turkish communities has played little part in this year's election campaign. The last round of UN-backed reunification talks collapsed in acrimony in 2017 and a UN summit in Geneva last month failed to reach an agreement on resuming talks. The conservative DISY party is expected to remain the largest in parliament but again without a majority, forcing President Nicos Anastasiades to continue to rule through a minority government. Cyprus has an executive system of government with the president elected separately, but the vote will gauge the popularity of Anastasiades, whose term expires in 2023. bur-cc/hc/sw
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