Former foreign minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis on Friday threw her support behind pro-reunification Turkish Cypriot leadership candidate Tufan Erhurman ahead of Sunday’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election.

“Good luck, Tufan Erhurman! Our wishes are with you and all our Turkish Cypriot compatriots who are fighting for a free, united, federal, European Cyprus – the homeland of all Cypriots,” she wrote in a post on social media.

She added that Erhurman’s campaign is being fought “for the future of this place, for our children, our youth, for peace, hope, progress”.

Meanwhile, former Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci, who was unseated by incumbent Ersin Tatar in 2020, offered his thoughts ahead of the election.

He said that earlier in the year, he had “stated that without intervention like in 2020, the candidate backed by [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, the AK Party, and the MHP would face a difficult task”.

Former foreign minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis

“I believe that the events unfolding behind the scenes in the 48 hours before polling day, the politicians who came and went, the former footballers, singers, and so on, were not enough to overcome this challenge,” he said.

He spoke of a “lack of knowledge about Cyprus” on the part of those who had come from Turkey to bolster Tatar’s campaign, describing it as a “negative factor”.

“This is how Cypriots feel. However, we must not forget the fact that the north of Cyprus is now more Turkey than it is Cyprus. I am not in a position to know what is happening behind the scenes. We also know from past experience what can be done in the last 48 hours,” he said.

Despite these fears, he said, “I hope with cautious optimism that a new era will begin after [Sunday], and that this era will be a new era in essence, not just in words”.

“The Turkish Cypriot community, in the person of Tufan Erhurman, must be both the creator and the controller of this new era,” he said.

Akinci’s comments come in reference to the fact that the Turkish government has made no secret of the fact that it would prefer to see Tatar re-elected, with a wave of officials from Turkey having visited the island in the runup to the election.

Most recently, the country’s Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz spent three days on the island campaigning for Tatar, but then unexpectedly left the island on Sunday evening.

Aside from Yilmaz, who during his previous visit made a speech at a Tatar campaign stop and was joined there by Turkish ambassador in Nicosia Ali Murat Basceri, former ministers Suleyman Soylu and Hulusi Akar, opposition Zafer Party leader Umit Ozdag, and former footballer Mesut Ozil have all visited the island in recent weeks to declare their support for Ersin Tatar.

Prior to that, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ruled out any return to negotiations towards a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, regardless of who wins next week’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election.

“The matter of federation is now closed for us. No one can draw us back into talks for a federation with wordplay. Turkish Cypriots will never accept being a minority on the island. The only realistic solution is to accept the existence of two states on the island,” he said.

These actions have drawn reactions from both Cyprus and Turkey, with Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci having described Ozil’s visit as “interference”, and described Ozil himself as a “model for the government’s public relations agency”.