Turkish Cypriot ruling coalition party UBP ‘MP’ Zorlu Tore declared himself the winner of the north’s ‘parliament speaker’ election shortly before midnight on Thursday after five rounds of voting in ‘parliament’ on the night and ten since the start of the week.
Tore, who had served as ‘speaker’ since being elected to the role after the north’s most recent ‘parliamentary’ elections in 2022, was his party’s nominee for the role during all five rounds of voting on Thursday.
In the first four rounds, he would have required 26 votes of approval to be elected but received 24 votes once and 25 votes three times.
In the final round, the rules state that whoever gets the most votes wins, and with Tore being the only candidate, he swiftly declared himself the winner after voting had finished; despite winning 23 votes of approval and having 25 ‘MPs’ vote to reject his nomination.
Effectively, therefore, he declared himself the winner on a ‘government’ majority of minus four, causing furious reactions from opposition ‘MPs’.
Outside the chamber in the early hours of Friday morning, opposition party CTP leader Tufan Erhurman said the four-day saga was proof that “the government has lost its ability to govern”, adding that Thursday night’s events were “the lowest point of the state of inability to govern”.
He added that early ‘parliamentary’ elections are now “inevitable”, and said, “from now on, the only item on the agenda is early elections”.
Some from the ruling coalition, including coalition party YDP leader Erhan Arikli, suggested that the next step may be to request an opinion on the election from the north’s ‘attorney-general’s’ office, though Erhurman and others in opposition were quick to rubbish the idea.
“Can you become parliament speaker with one vote? There is no need to even look at the internal regulations to answer this,” Erhurman said when asked about the idea.
Meanwhile, those opposition ‘MPs’ who were close enough to the count to take a picture of the official record were keen to point out that the record paper stated that Tore had been rejected and had lost the election.
As such, they said, Tore’s claim that he had in fact won the election was baseless. Multiple media outlets in the early hours of Friday morning claimed that Tore had waited for everyone to leave the chamber before changing the record himself in pen, scribbling out the word “lost” and replacing it with “won”, though this claim has not yet been verified.
Tore’s alleged scribbling out of ‘parliament’s’ official record was the last act of a chaotic day in Turkish Cypriot politics.
The day had begun with news that Tore, after being hospitalised with an elevated blood pressure on Tuesday and remaining there until Thursday afternoon, had refused to undergo an angiography and had subsequently been discharged.
Meanwhile, reports surfaced that the UBP and ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel had decided to re-nominate Tore as ‘house speaker’ after having initially nominated him on Monday when he lost four votes.
Ustel had then nominated former ‘minister’ Kutlu Evren, who lost one vote himself before the deadlock began on Tuesday. Evren had appeared to have remained as Ustel’s preferred candidate until shortly before Tore arrived in ‘parliament’ on Thursday evening.
With Tore back in place, the deadlock which had characterised Tuesday and Wednesday was broken, as he swiftly reopened ‘parliament’ and thus allowed it to vote on his candidacy.
His deputy, the CTP’s Fazilet Ozdenefe, had refused to allow any votes to go ahead while she was deputising for Tore on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Tensions were high as voting began, with Tore losing the first round by 25 votes to 24, before a second round was called. During round two, ‘energy minister’ Olgun Amcaoglu even said a prayer as he voted, and Tore won the second round by 25 votes to 24, though fell short of the 26 votes required to be named ‘speaker’.
It was at the end of round three that tempers boiled over, with Tufan Erhurman heading to the podium to tell his ‘parliamentary’ colleagues, “in fact, seven rounds of voting [on Tore] have now passed. It is nearly midnight again and you want to talk about going to an eighth round?”
After he had concluded his speech, things got physical, with UBP ‘MP’ Ahmet Savasan attempting to fight members of the opposition before being restrained by ‘agriculture minister’ Huseyin Cavus, ‘labour minister’ Sadik Gardiyanoglu, his predecessor Hasan Tacoy, all of whom belong to the same party as him.
News website Haber Kibris reported that at this point, Zorlu Tore asked, “is Savasan drunk?”
Once tensions had simmered down, the fourth round of voting took place and produced the same result as the second and third rounds, before Tore without taking a breath started proceedings for the fifth and final round which ended in such controversy.
