Cult figure and perpetual candidate Arif Salih Kirdag on Tuesday announced that he will once again stand for election as Turkish Cypriot leader when the election takes place on October 19.

“I am honoured to announce to the public that I am a candidate in the upcoming presidential election from now on, and I wish my opponents success,” he wrote in a post on social media.

He also thanked two individuals, “one of whom is a voter and one of whom is a Cypriot abroad”, for financially backing his campaign.

“I would like to thank them from a hidden corner of my heart,” 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 fifth place.

He spoke to the Cyprus Mail earlier this year, and presented himself as an outsider, accusing the four parties which have seats in the north’s ‘parliament’, the ruling coalition’s UBP, YDP, and DP, and the opposition’s CTP, of working together to keep themselves in power at the expense of others.

“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.

This year’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election campaign looks set to be dominated by two candidates: incumbent Ersin Tatar and former ‘prime minister’ Tufan Erhurman.

Tatar has won the endorsement of the three ruling coalition parties, while Erhurman has won the endorsement of the CTP, the party he leads, and of fellow opposition party the TDP, with all indications pointing towards a two-horse race.

Nonetheless, this has not deterred a total of three other people from formally announcing their own candidacies for election, with Kirdag’s announcement having been preceded by similar announcements by the Cyprus Socialist Party (KSP)’s Osman Zorba and independent Mehmet Hasguler.

The KSP most recently fielded a candidate in 2015, with Mustafa Onurer finishing in sixth place and winning 428 votes. Its website features pictures of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.

Hasguler is most notable for being arrested last year as part of investigations into the north’s “fake diploma scandal”, accused of taking under-the-table payments while the now-infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU)’s medicine school was applying accreditation.

At that time, he was the vice chairman of the north’s higher education accreditation authority (Yodak).

He was charged with extortion, accepting money in exchange for a failure to perform their public duty, receiving money in exchange for favour while in public office, and laundering the proceeds of a crime, and released on bail last March.