CTP will form north’s next ruling coalition, according to poll

Pro-federal solution, centre-left political party the CTP will form the north’s ruling coalition after the next legislative elections, according to the results of a poll released on Wednesday.

The poll was conducted by CMIRS, and asked 500 Turkish Cypriots for their political opinions during the month of March with 33 per cent saying they intend to vote for the CTP at the next election.

In second place in the poll is the UBP, the current largest party in the three-party nationalist ruling coalition, with 16.9 per cent of respondents saying they intend to vote for the party next time around.

Junior coalition partner the YDP, the party commonly associated with Turkish nationals living in Cyprus, is in third place, in the poll, garnering the favour of 7.9 per cent of respondents.

Meanwhile, pro-federation party the TDP, which lost all its seats in the legislature at the last election in 2022, looks set to make a return, with 7.7 per cent of respondents offering the party their support.

Centrist anti-corruption party the HP also looks set to make a return to the legislature, sitting on 7.3 per cent of the vote, with its leader Kudret Ozersay having resigned from his seat in 2022.

The sixth and final party referenced in the poll is junior coalition party the DP, which sits on 5.5 per cent of the vote.

Were these results to transpire on election day, the CTP would win 22 of the 50 seats in the Turkish Cypriot legislature, and while this would not give the party an outright majority, it would place it in a position of strength to form a ruling coalition.

The UBP, meanwhile, would win 11 seats, the YDP and the TDP would win five seats each, the HP would win four seats, and the DP would win three seats.

As such, were the CTP and the TDP to join forces, they would command an effective majority of four in the legislature, while adding the HP into that coalition would give it a majority of 12.

At the last election, the UBP won 24 seats, the CTP won 18 seats, the HP and the DP won three seats each, and the YDP won two seats.

In the intervening years, the HP has lost all its seats, with Ozersay having resigned and the party’s two other representatives having left to sit as independents, while the DP has also lost a member who now sits as an independent.

Ozersay’s resignation triggered a by-election which was won by the CTP’s Sami Ozuslu, bringing the CTP’s total to 19, though with Tufan Erhurman’s election as Turkish Cypriot leader last October, the party’s number of seats fell once again to 18.

The CTP was most recently in power between 2018 and 2019, as the largest party in a four-party coalition alongside the HP, the DP, and the TDP, under the leadership of then ‘prime minister’ Erhurman.

Since then, the UBP has spent almost seven consecutive years in power – the longest continuous stint of any party in power in the north since Dervish Eroglu spent eight and a half years as ‘prime minister’ during his first stint in the job, between 1985 and 1994.

However, this time around, their stint has taken in four ‘prime ministers’.

The first, Ersin Tatar, left the post to become Turkish Cypriot leader in 2020, the second, Ersan Saner, resigned after a video of him performing sexual acts on himself was leaked in 2021, and the third, Faiz Sucuoglu, resigned over internal party wranglings.

Incumbent Unal Ustel, however, will next month become the second-longest serving ‘prime minister’ in the history of the ‘TRNC’.

Having taken over from Sucuoglu on May 12, 2022, he will overtake the CTP’s Ferdi Sabit Soyer, who served for a total of four years and nine days, and remain behind only Eroglu, who spent a mammoth 16 years and 304 days in the job across three stints.