Turkish Cypriot perpetual candidate Arif Salih Kirdag on Friday said he will once again stand to be Turkish Cypriot leader in October if he can garner financial sponsorship to do so.

Speaking to the Cyprus Mail, he said the north’s ruling coalition’s plans to require candidates to amass 1,500 signatures to get their name on the ballot is a lesser obstacle than the financial discrepancy between the north’s largest political parties and independent candidates like himself.

“The biggest parties get 45 million TL (€1.2 million) every single year from the state. They can use that money to do campaigns, to market themselves, and that money also gets used to pay people to go and vote for them. How am I, when I am just here by myself, supposed to compete with that?” he said.

He added, “if I had that sort of money at my disposal, of course I would be able to find 1,500 people and many more to agree with me and sign up to vote for me, but it is much more difficult without having all that money”.

Political parties in the north receive public funding based on the vote share they received at the most recent ‘parliamentary’ election, with all parties which receive more than three per cent of the vote receiving a higher or lower share depending on the votes they won.

Kirdag centred his focus on the four parties which currently have seats in the north’s ‘parliament’, the three ruling coalition parties the UBP, the DP, and the YDP, and opposition party the CTP.

“Those four parties are collaborating with each other to keep themselves at the top. They get vast amounts of money from the state, they pay people to go and vote for them, and they are working together to keep themselves in power,” he said.

“Does this look fair or like a democratic system to you?”

He then added that despite the professed divide on the matter of the Cyprus problem between the three ruling parties and the opposition, all four parties are actually working together.

His solution, however, is somewhat different. He said that if he were to be elected Turkish Cypriot leader in October, he would suggest a trizonal confederal solution.

This would entail a northern zone inhabited primarily by Turkish Cypriots, a southern zone inhabited primarily by Greek Cypriots, and a third, mixed zone, comprising places such as Lefka, Nicosia, and much of the Mesaoria plain, which would be mixed.

Asked whether he can confirm that he will be a candidate, he was still reluctant to offer a definite commitment.

“If I can find the sponsorship to pay for me to run a proper campaign, I will be there,” he said.

Kirdag has run in every Turkish Cypriot leadership election this century but never wins more than a few hundred votes.

Despite this, he has become something of an iconic figure in Turkish Cypriot society in recent years, with a film about his political life having even been shown at the International Istanbul film festival in 2016.

The film, named “Basgan”, “president” in Cypriot Turkish, followed Arif and his wife Hulya through the 2015 Turkish Cypriot leadership election, in which he received 530 votes and finished in sixth place.

This year’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election is set to be a two-horse race, with incumbent Ersin Tatar and opposition political party CTP leader and former ‘prime minister’ Tufan Erhurman close in polls.

Such a two-horse race is set to see Turkish Cypriots faced with a binary choice between a leader who will advocate for a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem in Tatar, and one who will advocate for a federal solution in Erhurman.