The two leaders of ethnically split Cyprus met Thursday and said they are ready to work toward peace talks in coordination with the United Nations secretary-general. It was the first meeting between Greek Cypriot Leader Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman since Erhurman won a resounding victory in an October election.
As we noted last month, Erhurman campaigned on negotiating an end to the island’s ethnic rift and forming a federation with Greek Cypriots. He won more than 62 percent of the vote against incumbent Ersin Tatar, a nationalist who had not engaged in formal peace talks at all during his five-year term. Since Tatar’s victory in 2020, both Ankara and the Turkish Cypriot leadership had been “openly insisting on a two-state solution,” even though such a measure had been “explicitly rejected by the U.N. Security Council, which remains wedded to a bizonal, bicommunal federal settlement,” James Ker-Lindsay wrote for WPR in February 2023.
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