World press on Cyprus issue (March 7, 2014)

On Friday Turkey's news agency Hürriyet Daily News published an article by Yusuf Kanli headlined "Political crisis brewing in north Cyprus."

"Very much like the Turkish political landscape in northern Cyprus, around 60 percent of voters prefer to support conservative or liberal candidates in elections, while the remaining 40 percent go to socialist or social democrat candidates. If and when conservatives come up with a joint candidate or when one of the conservative parties manages to marginalize the others, either for mayoral seats or for presidency and even for Parliament, the left cannot have much chance," the article reads.

"There are still almost 14 months before the next presidential elections tentatively scheduled for the last Sunday of April 2015. Already incumbent conservative Derviş Eroğlu has been in efforts to win sufficient support for an easy victory while Mehmet Ali Talat, who lost the presidency to Eroğlu by a few hundred votes in the 2010 vote, has been touring villages, talking with people and trying to make a comeback," the author writes. 

"It is too early to say whether the race will be in between the two, but there are people already suggesting that perhaps the younger generation should produce presidential candidates. The socialist Foreign Minister Özdil Nami and liberal Kudret Özersay, the Turkish Cypriot negotiator in the Cyprus talks, are already tipped as probable candidates, though neither of the two have even implied the intention to walk such a road, Kanli believes.

"Today Prime Minister Özkan Yorgancıoğlu will head a team of the ruling Republican Turks’ Party (CTP) team to the DP headquarters, where the two parties will discuss the future of the government. Already, the DP has said their coalition with the CTP was limited to government and the socialists might terminate partnership with the DP if they are unhappy with a DP-UBP alliance in local polls," he believes.

"It is a very difficult decision to make for Yorgancıoğlu and his party, as not only is the combined strength of the DP and UBP enough to form a new government, the leftist Democratic Community Party (TDP) has declared it might join a DP-UBP coalition as well…" the article reads.