Incumbent Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar has overtaken his main challenger, opposition party CTP leader Tufan Erhurman, in polling for October’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election, according to the latest poll released by polling firm CMIRS on Monday.

The poll asked a total of 500 people face to face who they would vote for.

Tatar holds a slender lead in the poll, garnering 35.1 per cent of the vote compared to Erhurman’s 33.8 per cent, though compared to the last CMIRS poll, published in January, Monday’s poll represents a six per cent swing from Erhurman to Tatar.

Like all the other polls to have been published so far this year, the poll predicts that the election will be a two-horse race, with former Turkish Cypriot leader Dervish Eroglu’s chief negotiator Kudret Ozersay in a distant third place on 6.6 per cent.

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The north’s ‘transport minister’ Erhan Arikli finds himself in fourth place, on 6.2 per cent, while Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci is in fifth place with 5.8 per cent, one place above influential Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash’s son Serdar Denktash, who is on 4.5 per cent.

Sibel Siber, the north’s first ever female ‘prime minister’ and the CTP’s candidate in 2015, is in seventh place, on 2.3 per cent, while former ‘MP’ Gulsah Sanver Manavoglu and Ozdil Nami, chief negotiator for both Mehmet Ali Talat and Mustafa Akinci, both polled below two per cent.

The predicted a two-horse race is set to see Turkish Cypriots faced with a binary choice between a leader who will advocate for a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem in Tatar, and one who will advocate for a federal solution in Erhurman.

Were Tatar to win re-election, he would be the first Turkish Cypriot leader to do so since Rauf Denktash won by default in 2000 after his second round opponent Dervish Eroglu withdrew his candidacy.

Since then, Denktash did not stand for re-election and was replaced by Mehmet Ali Talat in 2005, Talat was beaten by Eroglu in 2010, Eroglu was beaten by Mustafa Akinci in 2015, and Akinci was beaten by Tatar in 2020.

The poll also looked at how Turkish Cypriots intend to vote in their next ‘parliamentary’ election, with the CTP and ruling coalition party the UBP effectively neck-and-neck, on 31.7 per cent and 31.1 per cent respectively.

Arikli’s party the YDP would be the third-largest party according to this poll, on 7.1 per cent, while only the TDP, of Harmanci and Akinci, and Ozersay’s HP, would likely break the five-per-cent barrier to enter ‘parliament’.

The DP, of ‘deputy prime minister’ Fikri Ataoglu and formerly of Serdar Denktash, would not win enough votes to win a seat for the first time since its founding in 1992.

The two partes polled at 5.1 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively, with the HP’s 4.7 per cent enough given that 6.9 per cent of voters said they would not vote at all.

It is estimated that were this the result on election day, the CTP and the UBP would win 20 seats each, the YDP would win four seats, and the TDP and the HP would win three seats each.

Under such a circumstance, the most likely ruling coalition would be between the CTP, the TDP, and the HP, returning all three parties to power for the first time since they served in a four-party coalition with the DP between 2018 and 2019.

The next Turkish Cypriot ‘parliamentary’ election must take place before February 2027.