Strangely, I’ve been through a million drafts already trying to find a way to begin this week’s column. The exciting and unavoidable nature of there being an election this week means I can’t really lead with anything else this Monday morning, but given that it hasn’t happened yet, I’ve reached the point where there’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said.
It is very unlikely that we’ll learn on Sunday who is going to be the next President, given the requirement for one candidate to win 50% of the vote share in order to avoid a runoff seven days later, but we will have some questions answered. I think at this point it’s fair enough to say that Kudret Özersay, Serdar Denktaş, and Erhan Arıklı have no chance of making it through to the second round, and that Mustafa Akıncı is in all probability home and hosed for another bite of the cherry on 18th. The question of who will be his challenger, however, is far less settled.
To my mind, the battle between CTP’s Tufan Erhürman and UBP’s Ersin Tatar is a toss up at this point. As I’ve already described, polls are pretty unreliable here so most of what I’m saying is not based on the most reliable set of numbers, but in the absence of anything better this is what I must go on. It seemed to me in recent weeks that this election was slipping through Tatar’s fingers, and that reached a crescendo last week with his last minute no-show at the first debate. He had an “emergency meeting” with the Vice President of Turkey Fuat Oktay, but he faced intense ridicule from opposition supporters, and nobody really bought the reasoning behind his trip to Ankara.
Since then, however, Tatar’s campaign has been running quite smoothly. He managed to secure 117 million Lira worth of aid out of his meeting with Oktay, which in reality is not an incredible amount of money but was enough to pacify some dissenters. After that he turned up to the Kıbrıs Postası debate, and got himself a few good quotes out of it, which have flooded social media ever since.
In this close race for a place in the second round, small things could make a big difference
A note on that Kıbrıs Postası debate, by the way – that was boring, wasn’t it? The most interesting part of the evening was that they decided to hold it on top of a swimming pool. I’d love to know what the thought was behind simply allowing each candidate a ten minute monologue on each subject with no interaction between them or comeback from the moderator. It felt like a waste of time to me.
Back to Tatar, however, and I think the Kıbrıs Postası debate may have helped him somewhat. His campaign team quickly utilised the “best bits” of what he said and turned them into snappy quotes much faster and much more effectively than any other candidate. In this seemingly close race between himself and Tufan Erhürman for a place in the second round, small things like this could potentially make a big difference.
These next few days are bound to be hectic. It seems that even at this late stage there is a large number of voters who are undecided, and candidates will be desperately scrapping for their votes right the way up to the final moment. Momentum can count for a lot at this stage, and honestly it is difficult to tell who has it. Tufan Erhürman has been a constantly growing force throughout this campaign, but the last five days have been very positive for Ersin Tatar.
As for a prediction? I’m far from sure, but at this moment I would say that it is most likely that Mustafa Akıncı and Tufan Erhürman will be into the second round. However, Ersin Tatar is not to be counted out just yet.
