Turkish Cypriot legislative and local elections set for December 6

Nicosia, Cyprus. Turkish Cypriots will hold legislative elections on December 6 after a bill setting out the election timetable passed through the legislature on Monday night. The vote will coincide with local elections, which were scheduled for the same date earlier this year.

Election timetable

After December 6, the next scheduled Turkish Cypriot poll will be the leadership election on October 20, 2030, four years later.

Many Turkish Cypriots will also be eligible to vote in the European Parliament elections on June 10, 2029. Fewer than 6,000 Turkish Cypriots voted in the most recent European Parliament elections in 2024.

December’s legislative elections will take place four years and ten months after the previous vote. This makes the current legislative term the longest since the legislature elected in 1998 served a full five years.

Ustel’s first electoral test as ‘prime minister’

The term will end with Unal Ustel as the second-longest-serving ‘prime minister’ in Turkish Cypriot political history. He took office in May 2022, three and a half months after the most recent legislative elections.

Only Dervish Eroglu, who served for almost 17 years across three separate periods in office, held the post longer than Ustel. Eroglu left office for the final time in 2010, aged 72. Ustel will turn 72 in January.

Despite Ustel’s relatively long tenure, December’s vote will be his first electoral test in the role. Faiz Sucuoglu contested the previous election as both ‘prime minister’ and leader of the conservative UBP, currently the largest party in the legislature.

Previous election and coalition

Sucuoglu took office in November 2021 and shortly afterwards called the January 2022 election. The UBP won 24 of the legislature’s 50 seats, before forming a coalition administration with the conservative DP and the right-wing YDP.

Sucuoglu subsequently faced political deadlock when he attempted to dismiss his ‘finance minister’, Sunat Atun. Ersin Tatar, the Turkish Cypriot leader at the time, refused to approve Atun’s dismissal.