Soundtracks from the Turkish Cypriot election

Each major candidate will come out with their own unique song

One Turkish Cypriot election tradition which is little known outside of the Turkish Cypriot community is the prevalence of election music.

Typically, each major candidate will come out with a song which becomes the soundtrack of their election campaign. This tradition appears to have been at least somewhat lifted from Turkey, where election songs are also an indispensable part of any campaign.

If you search Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s name or that of his AK Party using your music streaming app of choice, album upon album full of songs will appear, though it must be stressed that typically, the politicians themselves are not the ones doing the singing.

The tradition has been successfully maintained at this election, with opposition candidate Tufan Erhurman having released his effort, named Bu Yol Seninle Baslar [this road begins with you], last week.

The song is a Cypriot-infused pop-rock number, which would probably be referred to as C-Pop if this island had a larger cultural footprint, and, like most election songs, is something of a window into the man and the campaign.

Its overriding philosophy seems to be that the campaign said ‘yes’ to everybody so as to keep as many of his musically inclined supporters as possible onside and to bolster that sentiment of unity with which he and his campaign are attempting to characterise themselves, with no fewer 14 singers and 17 musicians featured on the track.

The lyrics, too, written by renowned journalist Cenk Mutluyakali, speak about “passionate hearts” and how “our hands are uniting with you”.

Incumbent Ersin Tatar, meanwhile, appears to be set to recycle the song used during his successful 2020 campaign, named En Dogru Karar [the most correct decision].

This song, a terrifically catchy rock number, more closely resembles the Turkish tradition, with his name featuring in the chorus, rhymed with the word “karar”.

Tatar’s song also employs the tried and tested method of name-dropping various places in Cyprus during its bridge, though the second part of its bridge, which begins with the words “enough is enough” in reference to his predecessor Mustafa Akinci, would ideally be modified given that he is now the incumbent.

While Tatar’s song is undoubtedly catchier than Erhurman’s this time around, a better election song is by no means a guarantee of electoral success.

If it were, we would likely have seen Serdar Denktash win by a landslide in 2020, with a song he actually did sing himself, called Sevdamiz Memlekettir [our love is our homeland].

Sevdamiz Memlekettir was the standout in a good field five years ago, an upbeat, folksy number which truly could have entered the pantheon of beloved Cypriot folk songs had it not been written for an election campaign which went on to amass just over 4,000 votes and finish in sixth place.

Mustafa Akinci’s song, used in both 2015 and 2020, was also catchy, featuring a football chant-esque repetition of his name amid a rock-based song not far removed from that of Tatar.

It was named Bir Isik Yaktin Bize [you gave us a light], and while another song, named Cevabimin Sesi [the sound of my response] was released in 2020, it could not hold a candle to the original.

While Tufan Erhurman’s “official” song in 2020 was a rock ballad named Dogrusu Gelecek, Dogrusu Cozum [the truth is the future, the truth is the solution], his campaign was better remembered for a folk adaptation of the song Adaliyiz Maviye [we are islanders in the blue] by Ahmet Okan.

The music video featured his supporters, wearing Erhurman-branded Covid-19 masks, inside Nicosia’s central Buyuk Han, eventually being joined by Erhurman and his wife Nilden Bektas Erhurman, who then proceeded to dance in front of them.

While an election song will typically be a fleeting success and confined to the dustbin of history very quickly after polling day, there are rare occasions on which a song becomes an all-time classic in its own right.

This is more prevalent in Turkey, partially because the same man has won almost every election for a generation, with an adaptation of Dombra by Ugur Isilak with lyrics instead about Erdogan, initially produced for the 2014 Turkish presidential election, now synonymous with the man.

In Cyprus, only one song has broken containment – Yesil Firtina [green storm], written for Erhurman’s party the CTP in the 2000s, which still regularly gets a rendition at CTP campaign events for all kinds of elections.

It is unclear what made Yesil Firtina last, though it does of course help that it was written for a party and not a single candidate, even if other songs written for parties have since fallen by the wayside.

One undoubtedly helpful quality for Yesil Firtina is it has bits written into it where a crowd can sing back, with the lyrics asking, “in a life without CTP, what would happen to this Cyprus?”, before answering, “peace would not happen, a solution would not happen”

There could also be an element of nostalgia, given that the CTP was well and truly in its pomp in the 2000s, and supporters of the party old enough to remember that time may wish to relive it through the medium of Yesil Firtina.

Whether similar fates await Bu Yol Seninle Baslar or En Dogru Karar in the years to come, only time will tell, but what is certain is that both will be played to excess over the next three weeks, and that one will be played non-stop on the night of October 19.