Turkish Cypriot ruling party UBP ‘MP’ Zorlu Tore on Friday insisted he had won the previous night’s ‘parliament speaker’ election after receiving 23 votes in favour and 25 against among his fellow ‘MPs’.

Speaking to the north’s public broadcaster BRT, he said, “in my opinion, I won this election,” adding that as he understands the ‘parliament’s’ regulations, he had won the election as he had been the only candidate.

He added that he had written to the north’s ‘auditor-general’ to request a legal opinion on the election, and said, “everyone must accept the opinion given by the legal department”.

Tore had served as ‘speaker’ since being elected to the role after the north’s most recent ‘parliamentary’ elections in 2022 and was his party’s nominee for the role for four rounds of voting on Monday and five more rounds of voting on Thursday.

The north’s ‘parliament’s’ internal regulations and Article 83 of the ‘TRNC’s’ constitution state that whoever gets the most votes in the fifth round of voting on any given day wins the election and becomes ‘speaker’.

As such, as soon as the votes had been counted shortly before midnight on Thursday, Tore declared himself the winner and closed ‘parliament’.

However, opposition ‘MPs’ reacted furiously, with opposition party CTP ‘MP’ Armagan Candan sharing a photograph of the official record paper of the vote, which stated that Tore had been rejected and had lost the election.

As such, they said, Tore’s claim that he had in fact won the election was baseless. Multiple media outlets in the early hours of Friday morning claimed that Tore had waited for everyone to leave the chamber before changing the record himself in pen, scribbling out the word “lost” and replacing it with “won”, though this claim has not yet been verified.