Opposition Turkish Cypriot leadership election candidate Tufan Erhurman holds a four-point lead over incumbent Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar ahead of next month’s election, according to a poll released by CMIRS.
The poll quizzed 500 Turkish Cypriots on how they plan to vote next month, with 47.6 per cent of respondents saying they would vote for Erhurman and 43 per cent saying they would vote for Tatar.
Of the minor candidates, 0.8 per cent of respondents said they would vote for Mehmet Hasguler, the former chairman of the north’s higher education accreditation authority (Yodak) who was arrested last year on suspicion of taking bribes, 0.6 per cent said they would vote for the Cyprus Socialist Party’s Osman Zorba, and 0.2 per cent said they would vote for cult figure and perpetual candidate Arif Salih Kirdag.
Additionally, four per cent of respondents declared themselves undecided and 3.8 per cent said they will not vote.
The poll is the first to be publicly released since April, when both CMIRS and fellow polling firm Genar both reported that Tatar held a slight lead over Erhurman.
Tatar is backed by all three parties in the north’s ruling coalition – the UBP, the YDP, and the DP – while Erhurman has won the support of his own party the CTP, as well as fellow opposition party the TDP.
He gained another endorsement on Thursday, with Serdar Denktash, the son of influential late Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, announcing his support for Erhurman during an appearance on Haber Kibris TV.
“The presidential election is not a matter of the heart, but of the mind and of logic. Therefore, my support will be for Erhurman. He will not fight with Turkey, but he will not say ‘yes’ to everything either, and he will provide a good environment for consultation,” he said.
He then offered scathing criticism for Tatar, saying, “you cannot even understand what one of these two candidates is saying”.
“At least you can understand what the other candidate is saying. Even if you disagree, you can still talk, oppose, and reach an agreement. I have absolutely no hostility towards anyone, but we have to make decisions based on reason and logic,” he said.
Denktash had been the DP’s candidate in 2020 and had intended to run this time around, too, before eventually ruling himself out of the race.
He had been a founding member of the DP when it split from the UBP in 1992.
Between 1996 and 2019, he served as the party’s leader, taking various ‘ministerial’ roles in that time, but subsequently left the party when it entered into a ruling coalition with the UBP in December 2020.
After announcing his endorsement, he appeared at Erhurman’s manifesto launch in Nicosia’s old town on Thursday night, with high-profile members of the CTP and the TDP, including former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat and Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci, also in attendance.
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