The latest poll to be published ahead of October 19’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election foresees incumbent Ersin Tatar defeating opposition-backed challenger Tufan Erhurman by a little over three per cent, with pollsters diverging in their predictions ahead of election day.

The poll, conducted by a company by the name of Public Global for newspaper Kibris, asked 1,516 people who they intend to vote for on October 19, with a stated margin of error of three per cent.

A total of 51.2 per cent of respondents said they would vote for Tatar and 47.9 per cent said they would vote for Erhurman, with the remaining 0.9 per cent saying they would vote for one of the minor candidates.

Saturday’s poll will be one of the last to be published ahead of the election, with the north’s supreme election council having announced on Wednesday that the publication of polls will be banned on Saturday until after the election.

It is also proof of a growing divergence between pollsters regarding the Turkish Cypriot electorate’s intentions, with a poll released by CMIRS on Thursday giving Erhurman a commanding 10-per-cent lead.

Four days prior, a poll published by Turkish research company Genar put Tatar in front by a margin of just 1.7 per cent, while a previous CMIRS poll published last month gave Erhurman a 4.6-per-cent lead.

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.

Erhurman advocates for a return to negotiations based on a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, while Tatar has insisted on the continuation of his policy of pursuing a two-state solution.

However, to do so, he will likely have to convince Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said in his speech to the UN general assembly last week that a solution to the Cyprus problem “cannot be built on the federal model” – the model set out in UN resolutions.

This, Erdogan said, is because attempts to find a federal solution to the Cyprus problem have “failed due to the intransigent stance of the Greek Cypriot side”.

Erdogan doubled down on this stance a few days later when asked about the election, saying that “no one can draw us back into talks for a federation with wordplay” and “the matter of federation is now closed for us”.