Nicosia- I have a new piece out today for The Redline Podcast titled “Cyprus Votes: Growing Rifts and Eastward Drift” on this past Sunday’s presidential election here in Cyprus where the traditional establishment parties were thrown a curve by the success at the ballot box in the first round of independent candidate Nikos Christodoulides who eschewed sticking with his former Democratic Rally party to strike out a new-ish path.
There’ll be a 2nd and final round between Christodoulides and more traditional elder left wing candidate Andreas Mavrogiannis who ,although running on his own, is essentially the AKEL party’s man in all but formal written declaration. I plan on doing a follow up piece next week once the final results have been tallied and a clear winner is announced. This is the first of three elections here in the region with Greece likely having parliamentary ones in April and Turkey both presidential and parliamentary in May (or June).
Greek Cypriots (and by that I mean registered voters in the Greek-run south of any ethnicity) will be casting their vote in a region with long-held deeply polarised divisions that has just suffered a catastrophic earthquake that has killed over 7000 at the time of this posting. This island came away unscathed at the quake was a mere 3.8 owing to its distance from the epicentre outside Gaziantep. I had a somewhat macabre thought that if disaster had struck here, it could have forced both sides across the UN-patrolled Green Line to look past their bitter differences and work together in rescue efforts with a sense of urgency that the peace process sorely lacks. This thought occurred mostly from seeing Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis offer his help to his Turkish neighbours with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan humbly taking a call from his perceived political nemesis on the other side of the Aegean.
Meanwhile the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus prepares to calmly move forward amid a sea of uncertainty.