Polish MEP from Elam’s Euro group meets Tatar

Polish member of the European Parliament Tomasz Poreba met with Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar at Tatar’s official residence in northern Nicosia on Wednesday.

After meeting with Tatar, he also met with the north’s ‘parliament speaker’ Zorlu Tore.

Speaking after the meeting, Poreba thanked Tore for informing him about the Cyprus problem and said what he was told was “compatible with my general views and thoughts”.

He added that having been an MEP for 15 years, he saw that “promises [to the Turkish Cypriots] were not kept and many opportunities were missed”.

Poreba is a member of Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), which is part of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) European party group – the same as Elam.

A fellow Polish ECR MEP, Patryk Jaki, even attended the pan-European ECR conference held by Elam in Nicosia in March.

Elam leader Christos Christou had told the Cyprus Mail at the time that the presence of high-profile ECR figures at the event showed that his party has “allies in Europe”, though Wednesday’s meeting may cast doubt on that assertion.

The UBP, the largest party in the north, and the party to which Ersin Tatar belonged until he was elected as Turkish Cypriot leader in 2020, was an ECR member until 2022.