Ustel meets Erdogan amid rumours of early election

Turkish Cypriot ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Thursday evening, with rumours abounding that he intended to use the meeting to gain Erdogan’s blessing to hold early legislative elections in the north.

No mention of any election was made in Ustel’s statement after the election, with his office instead choosing to highlight the “unwavering fraternal relations” between Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots, as well as plans for “joint steps to be taken within the framework of political stability, infrastructure investments, and development goals”.

However, it has been suggested that Ustel may decide to take the north to an early legislative election as soon as May, with problems appearing to mount for his three-party ruling coalition.

The north’s next ‘parliamentary’ election must be held before February next year, and Ustel had until recently been insistent that he would wait until the latest possible moment before calling an election, but with Ustel’s party, the UBP, and members of his inner circle embroiled in court cases, that date may be brought forward.

In recent weeks, members of the UBP have taken the party to court to protest down-ballot results of the party’s 2024 conference, with nine down-ballot results having been cancelled by the party as a result.

Ustel, who became party leader in 2022, had been challenged by former ‘labour minister’ Hasan Tacoy for the party’s leadership at that conference, and while Ustel won the election, Tacoy said at the time that he had borne witness to voter fraud taking place.

The logic follows that if down-ballot races continue to be taken to court, questions regarding the top of the ticket may be asked, and those questions may venture into the field of criminal liability.

Meanwhile, Ustel’s close personal associate Fatma Unal, a beneficiary of the 2024 party conference, having been elected as the UBP’s Kyrenia women’s branch leader, before being removed from that post by the party last November, is standing trial for alleged document forgery.

She is alleged to have received a degree under false pretences from Morphou’s now infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU), with it also having been alleged in court that Ziya Ozturkler, the man chosen by Ustel to be the north’s ‘parliament speaker’, also having been accused of criminal wrongdoing in that trial.

While no indictment has yet been forthcoming for Ozturkler, who joined Ustel in Ankara on Thursday night, a key witness in Unal’s case said Ozturkler had coerced university employees into awarding Unal the degree and then naturalised the people he had coerced as ‘TRNC’ citizens.

More recently, social media journalist Serdinc Maypa had on Thursday released a sound recording of a telephone conversation in which an unnamed businessman said he had paid Ustel a £300,000 bribe to persuade him to help facilitate the construction of a cable car in Kyrenia at some point between 2016 and 2018.

Ustel, Unal, and Ozturkler deny all accusations against them, but newspaper Yeniduzen reported this week that Ustel may wish to call an early election so as to ensure himself another five years of ‘parliamentary’ immunity, lest investigators and then prosecutors turn their attention to him.

His ‘transport minister’ Erhan Arikli, who belongs to a different party, the YDP, said the most likely date for an election would be in May or September.

Electoral law in the north stipulates that 60 days must pass between the calling of a legislative election and polling day, and elections take place on Sundays, meaning that if Ustel were to call an election now, the earliest date on which it could take place would be May 3.