Perpetual candidate Arif Salih Kirdag reaches highest ever position of third

Sunday’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election result was “a reaction from the Turkish Cypriot people” Turkish Cypriot perpetual candidate Arif Salih Kirdag said on Tuesday after achieving a high of third place.

“This vote was a reaction from the Turkish Cypriot people to a system which is not working, where the Republic of Turkey is sending its sons here to apply things which are not working. The Turkish Cypriot voters said they want something different, a different style of leadership,” he told the Cyprus Mail.

He also offered his services to Turkish Cypriot leader-elect Tufan Erhurman, suggesting that he should seek consensus after his victory by convening his electoral opponents on an advisory board.

“If Tufan Erhurman is really a democrat, if he really seeks to be everyone’s president, he should create an advisory board of all of the candidates who stood in Sunday’s election and take on our advice about how talks should be conducted to solve the Cyprus problem,” he said.

There were a total of eight candidates running in Sunday’s election, the last six of which received less than 500 votes each.

He then explained what his advice would be, pointing out that President Nikos Christodoulides had on Sunday night declared his readiness to resume negotiations towards a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, calling on Erhurman to join him at the negotiating table.

“Christodoulides said he was ready to go back to the table and resume talks, but I read somewhere that Erhurman has prerequisites which must be satisfied before he will start negotiations. I would not have prerequisites. I would go to the table and negotiate, and then we could discuss what we both want, and that is what I will tell Erhurman to do,” he said.

The prerequisites to which he was referring are claims made by journalist Sabahattin Ismail, who said Erhurman had told him that his prerequisites are that the Greek Cypriot side accept political equality, time-limit negotiations to a year at most, and preserve all past agreements.

Ismail said Erhurman also said he would issue one prerequisite to the United Nations and ask for a guarantee that embargoes placed on the Turkish Cypriots be lifted if the Greek Cypriot side leaves the negotiating table again.

Erhurman has previously alluded to similar demands, though in less specific terms, and has also previously stressed that “these are not our prerequisites, they are simply the UN’s own words”.

“This is not a list of preconditions. All of these have been listed by the UN in its own conditions that it has put forward at various times. The UN must keep its word. This is not a precondition,” he said last year.

Kirdag’s third-place finish on Sunday saw him amass 458 votes – almost double his tally of 282 from 2020, when he finished in eighth place. He won around 49,000 votes fewer than second-placed Ersin Tatar, the now outgoing Turkish Cypriot leader, who himself won around 38,000 fewer votes than Tufan Erhurman.

He has stood for election as Turkish Cypriot leader five times and has become something of an iconic figure in Turkish Cypriot society in recent years, with a film about his political life having even been shown at the International Istanbul film festival in 2016.