Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar maintained the slender lead he holds over challenger and opposition political party CTP leader Tufan Erhurman in polling for this October’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election, according to a poll conducted by Turkish research company Genar.
The poll asked 1,200 Turkish Cypriots who they planned to vote for and was conducted between March 8 and March 21.
Tatar leads the way, polling at 37.9 per cent, while Erhurman remains close behind on 36 per cent of the vote.
Like all the other polls to have been published so far this year, the poll predicts that the election will be a two-horse race, with the north’s ‘transport minister’ Erhan Arikli in a distant third place on 7.1 per cent.
Narrowly behind him in the poll are Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci and former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator for the Cyprus problem Kudret Ozersay, who won 7.1 per cent and exactly seven per cent of respondents’ support respectively.
Serdar Denktash, the son of influential former Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, polled at 4.6 per cent.
Genar chairman Ihsan Aktas said of the poll that Tatar’s “foreign policy and institutional consolidation have had a positive impact on voter perception”.
The company’s poll is the second in a week to project Tatar to hold a slight advantage over Erhurman, with a poll released by polling firm CMIRS on Monday seeing Tatar garner 35.1 per cent of support, compared to Erhurman’s 33.8 per cent.
Were Tatar to win re-election, he would be the first Turkish Cypriot leader to do so since Rauf Denktash won by default in 2000 after his second-round opponent Dervish Eroglu withdrew his candidacy.
Since then, Denktash did not stand for re-election and was replaced by Mehmet Ali Talat in 2005, Talat was beaten by Eroglu in 2010, Eroglu was beaten by Mustafa Akinci in 2015, and Akinci was beaten by Tatar in 2020.
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