Turkish opposition leader says north should be called ‘Turkish Republic of Cyprus’

The north should be called the “Turkish Republic of Cyprus”, the man installed by a court decision as leader of Turkey’s largest opposition political party, the CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu said on Tuesday. “The late [Turkish prime minister Bulent] Ecevit went and took Cyprus, did he not? The Turkish Republic of Cyprus was established. I do not call it northern Cyprus. Its name is the Turkish Republic of Cyprus. Its official name should be the Turkish Republic of Cyprus,” he told television channel TV100. He added that “with the Turkish Republic of Cyprus, our rights in the eastern Mediterranean have been secured”, and that “this is what I mean by republican autonomy”. The comments come after he had last week issued a long intervention regarding Turkey’s holding of last week’s Nato leaders’ summit, saying that Nato “does not yet have a comprehensive southern strategy”, and that Turkey would be “the natural architect of this strategy”. “Rebuilding state capacity in Syria and Iraq, a common framework for combating terrorism, managing migration at its source, and maritime and energy security in the eastern Mediterranean are not points of complaint for us, they are the headings of the strategy which Turkey will propose to the alliance,” he said, He has been the CHP’s leader since a court decision in May annulled the party’s 2023 conference and removed the man elected as leader at that conference, Ozgur Ozel, from office. This court decision drew mass protests in Turkey’s largest cities and provoked a full-blown crisis inside the CHP, with a series of local mayors leaving the party in its aftermath. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Ozel was preparing to create a new party as soon as next week, though Ozel had himself last month said that his efforts to fight May’s court decision “are not about leaving the CHP”, and that “we will achieve” a return to power in Turkey “not by abandoning the party, but by fighting with the party”. Instead, he said, any new party which is created will be a “backup” – effectively an auxiliary party in existence to ensure that should the government call a snap election, there will be a structure to fight that election should the CHP be barred from standing candidates due to the annulment of its party conference. On this front, it has been rumoured that the ruling AK Party may use the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its founding, August 14, to call snap parliamentary and presidential elections. Under Turkey’s current constitution, incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cannot run for re-election as Turkey’s president if the next election is held at the end of his current term, with the currently foreseen date set as May 7, 2028. However, if the country’s parliament calls an election ahead of time, his current term will not be considered fulfilled, and he will be able to stand again. Calls for the north to change its name have been made in the past, with former Turkish defence minister Hulusi Akar having frequently demanded that it be called the “Turkish Republic of Cyprus”, most recently in April this year. Former Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar, too, said he wished the north could change its name, “because after all, when the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was declared by our founding president, it was continuing talks for a federal solution at that time, and it was Turkey’s policy, of course”. However, there is no legal mechanism for such a change to take place, and it is expressly prohibited by the ‘TRNC’s’ constitution. As such, any name change for the north would require that the ‘TRNC’ be dissolved.