By Barçın Yinanç
“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will have several bilateral meetings in the margins of the NATO summit; yet all of them will be very short. His longest meeting will be with Antonio Costa and Ursula Von Der Leyen,” a Turkish diplomat told a European expert at a side event that took place in Ankara.
“We need to engage more to address the issue of trust,” added the diplomat as the expert discussed the lack of trust in Turkey-EU relations.
“Türkiye has been an important partner in addressing the crises in the Middle East and supporting efforts for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, usually referred to as VDL, said on social media.
“We must also seize the renewed momentum to advance a settlement of the Cyprus issue through the UN-led process,” she added, after meeting Erdoğan.
Only four days after the meeting, the European Commission designated Executive Vice-President Raffaele Fitto as the commission's special representative for Cyprus.
“In this capacity, he will contribute to the settlement process within the United Nations framework, in close cooperation with the UN Secretary-General's Personal Envoy on Cyprus, María Ángela Holguín Cuéllar,” said the press statement.
The timing suggests that Ankara was informed about the decision and that the EU received tacit approval, or at least the impression that there would not be a strong reaction to this initiative.
Traditionally, Turkey has objected to the EU’s “involvement” in the Cyprus peace process, arguing the bloc is biased. Brussels bypassed Ankara’s objections by appointing an official who already had a separate task within the commission.
Serge Abou was already head of the commission's Turkey desk when he became the EU's first representative on the Cyprus issue in 1994. Turkish officials would meet him only in his Turkey desk capacity, pretending to ignore his second hat.
TWO HATS FOR CYPRUS
This time VDL appears to have appointed a high-ranking official, whose nomination has been greeted with a relatively calm reaction from Ankara.
This is an internal matter for the EU, according to the statement from the Turkish Foreign Ministry, which also underlined Ankara’s expectation for the official to “work toward changing the EU’s partisan position.”
No doubt Ankara’s determination to talk only about a two-state solution, which prevented any resumption of talks on the island since their failure in 2017, has softened.
The AKP government is grateful to the EU for its silence over the democratic backsliding in Turkey.
In addition, Ankara needs to keep relations in track with the EU, as the country faces being excluded from the European market due to protective measures such as Made in Europe. Softening its stance towards a renewed effort on Cyprus which might end up going nowhere, is cost-free.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wants to make a last-ditch effort before his term ends in December, and his personal envoy is working on a new framework to start talks by the end of summer.
All this diplomatic activity after nine years of hiatus has failed, however, to generate excitement in Northern Cyprus, which stands to benefit most from a resolution.
CAUTIOUS STANCE AMONG CURRENT POLITICIANS
Even center-left leaders, who have always favored continuing talks, adopted a highly cautious stance.
Drawing on experience, the new generation of politicians in Turkish Cyprus, especially those on the left, appear less naive and more realistic not only in terms of relations with Ankara but also on the peace talks.
Tufan Erhürman, the joint candidate of the left parties, won a landslide victory last October, against the incumbent president who, under strong influence from Ankara, favored a two-state solution. He also won on the promise that he would not fight with Turkey.
Erhürman, 55, does not have the left’s traditional eagerness for an immediate return to talks.
On renewed diplomatic activity, he said he wanted to avoid appearing overly eager abroad or creating expectations at home he cannot fulfill.
He argued that talks should not be open-ended and that failure should not simply lead back to the status quo. Rather than calling these conditions, he frames them as methodology — a tactical choice that avoids portraying the Turkish Cypriot side as obstructive.
Calling them conditions would allow the Greek Cypriot side to argue that the Turkish side is unwilling to negotiate.
After Erhürman became president, Sıla Usar İncirli, 53, was elected to replace him as the Republican Turkish Party (CTP) leader.
With the CTP leading in polls ahead of year-end elections, İncirli could become Turkish Cyprus’ first female prime minister. That would mean that for the first time in the North a left-wing president will work with a left-wing government.
The traditionally problematic relationship of left-wing parties with Ankara was aggravated especially under the AKP government. But, like Erhürman, İncirli is also cautious in her rhetoric about Ankara.
“Our relations with Turkey are vital to us. They must be maintained through strong institutional ties, close communication, and consultation,” she told me when I met her last month.
Previous CTP leaders avoided criticizing the pro-settlement camp among Greek Cypriots. The decision of AKEL, the CTP’s counterpart on the Greek Cypriot side, to shift to the “no” camp at the last moment in 2004, despite initially supporting a settlement, disappointed many Turkish Cypriot left-wingers. The disappointment remains strong, especially after the failure in Crans-Montana in 2017, where, despite major concessions from the Turkish side, it was the Greek Cypriot side that brought the talks to an end.
The new CTP leader appears to approach Greek Cypriot politicians with cautious realism rather than romantic naivety. “We see serious uncertainty and ambiguity in the Greek Cypriot side’s commitment to a settlement,” said İncirli.
If the CTP fails to win a parliamentary majority, its most likely coalition partner will be the Communal Democracy Party (TDP), which supported Erhürman in the presidential elections.
The TDP has been led by Zeki Çeler, born in 1981, for the past three years.
Unlike previous leaders, Çeler and his team prioritize Northern Cyprus’s domestic issues over focusing solely on the settlement process. “We are moving away from being marginal and positioning ourselves as center-left,” Çeler told me.
This is what he said about relations with Turkey: “Turkish Cypriots have never sought confrontation with Ankara. Sometimes Ankara tried to make us more ‘Turkified.’ Nowadays there is an effort to make us more ‘Muslim.’ There is no need for that. We confront Ankara when there is interference with our way of life. Otherwise, we are aware that we need to act in tandem on military and geostrategic issues.”
The TDP’s former leader Mustafa Akıncı’s criticism of Turkey’s military operations — including the one in 1974 — when he was the president of Turkish Cyprus had attracted the wrath of Ankara.
Left-wing groups on the island tended to take a more critical stance toward the presence of Turkish troops. When I asked how TDP viewed Turkey’s deployment of four F-16 fighter jets to the island after several European countries sent warships to the region at the start of the Iran war, I received the following response:
“Greece will send [forces], France will send [forces], the United States will use this place as it sees fit, exposing us to risks related to Israel — and Turkey will simply remain silent? No way!” Like İncirli, Çeler is also sceptical of the Greek Cypriots' will for a solution.
International mediators are likely to encounter a different leadership approach when dealing with the Turkish Cypriot side's new left-wing leadership.
