The communist AKEL party governed the Republic of Cyprus from February 2008 to February 2013. During this period, AKEL had to deal with grave economic problems. This article uses the European Elections Study (2009) data and presents probably one of the strongest statistical models in the literature by specifying a model that can explain up to 91% of the variance. We show that retrospective sociotropic evaluation of the economy by the Greek Cypriots has a significant effect on their choice to vote or not for the incumbent party even under such a strong test. Based on these results, one may argue that the considerable amount of votes lost by AKEL in February 2013 elections was because of the deteriorating economic situation since the party took office in February 2008.
