Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman on Wednesday evening departed Cyprus for Turkey ahead of his first meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since being elected to the role last month.
His first engagement on Thursday will be a visit to the Anitkabir, the mausoleum of the Republic of Turkey’s founding president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, before he will then meet Turkish parliament speaker Numan Kurtulmus.
He will then meet Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, before holding a bilateral meeting with Erdogan, which will be followed by a wider meeting of Turkish and Turkish Cypriot delegations.
After the conclusion of that meeting, Erhurman and Erdogan will hold a joint press conference, with Erhurman then set to return to Cyprus.
The meeting will come with Ankara remaining outwardly unconvinced by the prospect of a return to negotiations based on a federal solution to the Cyprus problem – the model publicly favoured by both Erhurman and President Nikos Christodoulides – with Erdogan having last week repeated his demand for a two-state solution instead.
However, prior to that, Erdogan appeared to be more willing to acquiesce to the idea of a return to negotiations, saying after Erhurman’s landslide victory in last month’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election that the Turkish Cypriots’ will is “highly respected by us”.
“Our relations with north Cyprus will continue as they have been until now under the AK Party government,” he told, referencing his party’s 23-year stint in power so far.
Throughout the election campaign, Erhurman insisted that Cyprus problem negotiations would be conducted “in tandem with the Republic of Turkey”.
As such, in the absence of a meeting having been held with Erdogan, he announced during his first meeting with United Nations special representative Khassim Diagne late last month that he had delayed his planned first meeting with UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin.
Instead of the originally planned first meeting during the first 11 days of November, Erhurman and Holguin will now most likely meet on December 5.
This delay came at Erhurman’s behest and will also likely see the next enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem, involving Cyprus’ two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, and the UN, also be delayed.
It had originally been set to take place at the end of this month but will now most likely take place in January, with Erhurman set to use the extra time to attempt to build closer relations with the Turkish government.
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