Supporting opposition candidate Tufan Erhurman at October’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election is “the right thing to do”, Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci said on Wednesday.

Speaking to Genc TV, Harmanci, who belong to opposition political party the TDP, lamented the “delay” in left-leaning political parties outside of Erhurman’s CTP in rallying around a single candidate, and added, “the presidential election must be won this time”.

“There is no need for further division of discourse,” he said.

Erhurman was announced as the CTP’s candidate during the party’s conference in March. This October’s election will also be his second run for the office, with him having finished third in 2020, winning just shy of 21.7 per cent of the vote, and endorsing then incumbent Mustafa Akinci in the second round.

He will challenge the incumbent Ersin Tatar, who formally kicked off his campaign to win re-election last month, bringing together the three political parties which have endorsed his campaign, the UBP, the YDP, and the DP for his first major rally of the year.

Those three parties have also formed the north’s ruling coalition for almost the entirety of Tatar’s term in office.

Tatar and Erhurman have been trading the lead in election polling, with the most recent poll, conducted by Turkish research company Genar, seeing Tatar lead the way, polling at 37.9 per cent, while Erhurman remains close behind on 36 per cent of the vote.

Harmanci had earlier appeared to be weighing up a run of his own for the Turkish Cypriot community’s highest office after taking a landslide victory at the 2022 Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayoral election, winning 49.4 per cent of the vote – twice the tally of the CTP’s candidate Sila Usar Incirli and the UBP’s candidate Sadik Gardiyanoglu.

In January last year, he had said that it is “not possible for a politician who received 49 per cent of the vote” in a mayoral election to stay on as mayor when bigger, more consequential elections are set to take place.

“In the long run, seeing it this way is a very narrow view. One needs to evolve into other political spheres. I am aware of the responsibility society gave me with 49 per cent of the vote,” he said at the time.

The TDP and the CTP had put forward separate candidates in both the 2020 and 2015 Turkish Cypriot leadership elections, with Mustafa Akinci having been the TDP’s candidate on both occasions. The CTP put forward the north’s first ever female ‘prime minister’ Sibel Siber in 2015 and Erhurman in 2020.

The 2020 campaign was bitterly fought by both parties, and as such, high-ranking members of both parties have sought to avoid “internal” conflict on the Turkish Cypriot left this time around, particularly in light of Tatar rapidly winning the endorsement of all three ruling coalition parties.