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Tufan Erhürman of the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), who recently won elections in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), will officially take over the presidency post from former President Ersin Tatar in a ceremony on Friday.
On the day of the ceremony, Erhürman is expected to first take the oath at the TRNC Parliament and then lay a wreath at the graves of Turkish Cypriot leaders Dr. Fazıl Küçük and Rauf Denktaş.
After that, he is expected to go to the TRNC presidential complex, where Erhürman will be greeted with a military ceremony.
Elected as the sixth president of the TRNC, Erhürman’s first international visit will be to Türkiye, as is traditional. The date of the visit is expected to be determined next week. Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, who will represent Türkiye at the handover, will arrive in Lefkoşa (Nicosia) this evening and attend the ceremonies tomorrow.
Center-left politician Erhürman won a landslide victory over Tatar during last week’s elections.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan congratulated the new leader following the election, but Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli’s comments highlight the nationalist bloc’s push for closer political and territorial alignment with Ankara.
The Turkish main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which enjoys close ties with Erhürman’s CTP, also lauded the election results.
Bahçeli, on the other side, said on Tuesday that the TRNC should hold a parliamentary vote to join Türkiye.
The island has been mired in a decades-long dispute between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, despite a series of diplomatic efforts by the U.N. to achieve a comprehensive settlement.
Ethnic attacks starting in the early 1960s forced Turkish Cypriots to withdraw into enclaves for their safety. In 1974, a Greek Cypriot coup aimed at Greece’s annexation led to Türkiye’s military intervention as a guarantor power to protect Turkish Cypriots from persecution and violence.
As a result, the TRNC was founded in 1983. The country is fully recognized only by Türkiye, which does not recognize the Greek Cypriot administration in the south.
The island has seen an on-and-off peace process in recent years, but negotiations have been stalled since 2017. Erhürman advocates resumption of the formal negotiations with the Greek Cypriot side. Tatar repeatedly met with Greek Cypriot leaders in informal talks brokered by the U.N., but those negotiations did not yield any concrete results for the final status of Cyprus.
