North’s largest party to decide leader on Saturday

The UBP, the largest political party in the north, will decide who its leader will be at its party conference on Saturday.

The party’s 21,000 members will be able to vote for one of incumbent party leader and the north’s ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel, former ‘minister’ and current ‘MP’ Hasan Tacoy, and Ahmet Karavelioglu, who currently holds no elected office.

The UBP is currently the largest of a three-party ruling coalition in the north, with its party leader thus typically being ‘prime minister’. The party has been in ‘government’ continuously since 2019, and if Ustel fails to defend his position on Saturday, his replacement will be the fifth ‘prime minister’ to have taken office in that time.

The campaign

The build-up to the conference and the leadership campaign has been one riddled with controversy, with the latest episode having been played out in court on Friday.

Tacoy had sued the party in July, arguing that in accordance with the relevant laws, only UBP members registered to the party before January 22 should be able to vote. However, the party had argued that those registered as late as March 21 should have the right.

In court on Friday, the party won, with party secretary-general Oguzhan Hasipoglu explaining after the court’s decision that the difference of opinion had been regarding the six months of party membership required before a member can vote at conferences.

Tacoy’s position was that those six months should have been measured from six months before the “conference period”, wherein smaller local party branch elections begin weeks before the main event.

However, Hasipoglu and the court agreed that the six months should be calculated from the main event itself.

Tacoy was incensed by the court’s decision, saying the party’s current leadership “has preferred to prepare member lists according to their own whims”.

He also pointed out that more than 10 party branch elections have so far been suspended or had their results declared invalid in court. One such case was that of the UBP Kyrenia women’s branch chairwomanship, which was won by a woman named Fatma Unal.

Unal is known to be a close ally of Ustel, and, according to newspaper Yeni Duzen, her opponent in the election Muge Yuceturk filed a lawsuit claiming that people from the ‘prime minister’s’ office were “intervening” in the voting process, that a man voted, and that people also voted without presenting any identification.

Earlier in the campaign, it had been reported that then-Turkish ambassador Metin Feyzioglu had summoned UBP ‘MPs’ Olgun Amcaoglu and Kutlu Evren to his residence to order them not to stand for the party’s leadership.

The reports were not denied by any of the related parties and Feyzioglu was relieved of his duties days later.

The background

Ustel became UBP leader after standing unopposed at an extraordinary party conference in September 2022 but had already been ‘prime minister’ for four months by that time.

He replaced Faiz Sucuoglu as ‘prime minister’ in May that year after Sucuoglu found himself unable to form a governing coalition after refusing to acquiesce to a list of demands put down by his coalition partners the DP and the YDP.

Sucuoglu himself had only become leader in November 2021, winning a bitterly fought election over Hasan Tacoy and predecessor Ersan Saner, who dropped out of the race when videos of him performing sexual acts on himself over a webcam surfaced online.

The 2021 leadership election was a carry-over from the abandoned 2020 leadership election, contested by Sucuoglu and Tacoy, which was cancelled halfway through the process for reasons of party unity. Saner was subsequently made caretaker party leader as a “safe pair of hands”.

The UBP have been in ‘government’ continuously since May 2019, with Ustel being the fourth person to lead the party and serve as ‘prime minister’ in that time. They have also seen coalitions with three different parties.

They first returned to ‘government’ in coalition with the HP, before that ‘government’ collapsed in October 2020 after HP leader Kudret Ozersay reacted furiously to then-‘prime minister’ Ersin Tatar opening Varosha without telling him.

Tatar was then elected as Turkish Cypriot leader ten days later, before Saner was installed and formed a three-party coalition with the DP and the YDP.

That coalition lasted until Saner’s ouster, when the YDP left the ‘government’, though they swiftly returned under Sucuoglu after the ‘parliamentary’ elections of January 2022 and remained under Ustel from May that year onwards.

The candidates

Having remained in office for two years and four months, Ustel is already the fifth-longest serving ‘prime minister’ in the north’s history.

Only Dervish Eroglu, Ferdi Sabit Soyer, Irsen Kucuk, and Hakki Atun have served for longer, while household names including Ersin Tatar and Mehmet Ali Talat spent less time as ‘prime minister’ than Ustel already has.

Tacoy has served in various ‘ministerial’ positions in the north in his long political career, having first been elected as an ‘MP’ in 1998. Most recently, he served as ‘labour minister’ under Ustel before being relieved of his duties last year.

Saturday will be his fourth attempt to be elected as his party’s leader. In addition to his unsuccessful campaign in 2021 and the abandoned leadership election of 2020, he ran to be the party’s leader in 2010 after Dervish Eroglu was elected as Turkish Cypriot leader but was beaten by Irsen Kucuk.

What will happen

The party conference will begin on Saturday morning, with the leadership candidates set to be present in the conference hall from around 9.15am. Voting will take place between 11am and 9pm, with voters also asked to choose the 70 members of the UBP’s party congress.

The votes will then be counted on Sunday from 10am, with the results of the leadership election set to be announced when counting is complete.