Tatar swept away by Erhurman landslide

The inflection point in Turkish Cypriot politics, the crossroads, the quasi-referendum between a two-state solution and a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, between Europe and Turkey, this year’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election which sat on a knife-edge on the morning of October 19, was over in an unprecedented landslide a few hours later.

Pro-reunification candidate Tufan Erhurman won 62.8 per cent of the vote, a proportion not matched since Rauf Denktash’s victory in 1990, ousting incumbent Ersin Tatar, who had advocated for a two-state solution, and who won just 35.8 per cent of the vote on a chastening night for him.

Tatar was beaten in all six of the north’s electoral districts, including Trikomo, typically a stronghold for nationalist candidates, and managed to win just 29.4 per cent of the vote in northern Nicosia.

Erhurman, meanwhile, won 87,137 votes – almost 20,000 more than the previous record number of votes amassed by a Turkish Cypriot leadership candidate.

The campaign was a long one, effectively beginning in earnest more than six months before polling day during a weekend in April in which Erhurman officially announced his candidacy and won the support of centre-left party the CTP and Tatar’s campaign was endorsed by the right-wing UBP.

Those announcements came amid a political storm within the Turkish Cypriot community, with the north’s ruling coalition, comprising the UBP and two other, smaller parties, the DP and the YDP, both of which also endorsed Tatar’s campaign, attempting to bring about a wildly unpopular legalisation of hijabs in public schools.

Two days after he announced his election candidacy, Erhurman joined 13,000 other Turkish Cypriots on the streets of Nicosia in protest against the move, while Tatar’s wife Sibel further complicated things for him and for the ruling coalition which endorsed her husband’s campaign by calling into a television channel and declaring her support for the protesters.

Things were not plain sailing for Erhurman in the campaign’s early stages either, however, as he sought to thread the needle of opposing Tatar and the ruling coalition while not coming into open political conflict with Turkey’s government.

He and his campaign were well aware of the perils of being seen by Ankara to be in opposition to it, given the fact that Ankara had shown a clear preference for Tatar over his pro-reunification opponent Mustafa Akinci in the 2020 campaign after Akinci had opposed Turkish foreign policy the previous year.

However, he swiftly drew the ire of left wing Turkish Cypriot media outlets after attending and praying alongside Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new courthouse which is now under construction in the northern sector of the Nicosia suburb of Ayios Dhometios,

The opportunity to “redeem” himself in their eyes came quickly, however, with more protests against the hijab law being held around the north, and Erhurman speaking in the Cypriot Turkish dialect and dancing to folk songs in front of the crowds.

Tatar’s next major appearance was the opening of the new palace in Ayios Dhometios, which was to be his official residence, in May, before the intensity of the campaign began to tail off for the summer.

He still had time to hold an official campaign launch event in June, before a period of relative quiet on the campaign front.

When the campaign recommenced in earnest in August, it was Erhurman who once again had the initiative, attracting around a thousand people to a rally at the Kyrenia port and declaring that “every corner of this island will be Europe”.

While Tatar did not have the same number of people attend his rallies, he did seem to have the mandate of Ankara despite Erhurman’s best efforts, with Cevdet Yilmaz and Turkish ambassador in Nicosia Ali Murat Basceri both attending a campaign stop in the Karpas peninsula village of Yialousa.

Despite these efforts, however, the campaign was plagued by other headaches, with a rapid-fire handing out of civil service jobs, citizenships, land, and firearms licences by the ruling coalition in the days leading up to the pre-election cutoff point in August prompting concern and criticism from both inside and outside the three ruling parties.

Media reports at the time stated that Tatar had “personally intervened” to stop the handouts, but Erhurman responded by claiming that his election opponent knew all along about the issue.

The campaign’s next act was a late-night 1,000-word tirade released by Tatar calling Erhurman a liar and saying that his “political success” was zero, among other things. Erhurman responded by inviting Tatar to a one-on-one televised debate, though such a debate never happened.

As the campaign wore on, it became increasingly clear that those who had endorsed Tatar believed that he was markedly less popular than a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem, with multiple figures from the ruling coalition imploring the Turkish Cypriot electorate to vote not for one of two men, but for the “national cause” of a two-state solution.

Erhurman, meanwhile, said during a television appearance carried on multiple channels that Tatar’s policies were turning the north into an “open-air prison” and that his term in office constituted “a lost five years”.

A humorous aside from that television appearance was hundreds of accounts with names which were clearly not Cypriot using Facebook’s “angry” emoticon to react to livestreams of the interview.

Erhurman described them as “dear friends from around the world”, though while the timeline of events in hindsight resembles one-way traffic, public polling available at the time reflected a race much closer than what eventually transpired.

Throughout the year, polling typically had him and Tatar within a couple of percentage points of one another, suggesting an open fight for the office and not the steamrollering which happened in reality.

The end of September brought Ankara back into play, too, with World Cup-winning former footballer and current high-ranking member of Turkey’s ruling AK Party Mesut Ozil being deployed to the island to boost Tatar’s campaign.

His arrival on the island came after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had openly endorsed a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem, seemingly at the time shutting the door on any change of stance on the matter, no matter who would win the election, leading some at the time to believe that Ankara’s influence would secure Tatar a second term.

Meanwhile, the north’s ruling coalition’s latest gambit saw a resolution declaring support for a two-state solution rammed through its legislature, though this swiftly drew criticism, with Serdar Denktash, the son of influential Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, who founded the ‘TRNC’, saying that the resolution was “nothing short of manipulation of the election”

However, as it turned out, the margin of the election was beyond the reach of any manipulation, with Erhurman being sworn into office a few days later and calling for a solution to the Cyprus problem “where everyone wins” and for “lasting peace” in his first speech.

Now, he faces President Nikos Christodoulides as his interlocutor, with the pair having met twice so far in what United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin has described as “a very good start”.

Both men agreed that “the real aim is the solution of the Cyprus problem with political equality as described by the United Nations security council resolutions” during a tripartite meeting with Holguin in the middle of December, and 2026 will bring with it the possibility, if not the guarantee, of progress.