Turkish Cypriot ‘MP’ Hasan Tosunoglu on Wednesday announced that he had left his party, the ruling coalition’s DP, bringing the ruling coalition’s ‘parliamentary’ majority down to six.
Tosunoglu was one of three ‘MPs’ from the DP elected at the ‘parliamentary’ elections in January 2022 and remained on the backbenches throughout the almost three years since then, but spoke on Wednesday of a disillusionment with his party’s direction.
He said his party has become “silent, apolitical, and without an attitude”, with the party’s political platform in recent years having grown ever closer to that of the ruling coalition’s largest party the UBP.
To this end, he said he had “voiced discomfort in every place” but that “these complaints were not taken into consideration”.
“Being an MP who is expected to remain passive in parliament and only raise and lower one’s hand [to vote], whose opinions are not listened to, is not something I can tolerate. I have not been able to change this mentality, and I have been struggling with this for a long time. At this point, I have no other choice,” he said.
Party leader Fikri Ataoglu said later on Wednesday that he had received a text message from Tosunoglu informing him of the decision on Tuesday night.
“I said we should talk on Friday, but we saw this morning what happened. Of course, a resignation is a one-sided thing. I respect it, but his criticism is unacceptable. The decisions made are made through the party’s organs. His resignation is a personal decision,” he said.
Tosunoglu is not alone in having left the DP in recent years, with founding member and party leader for 21 years Serdar Denktash having left the party when it entered into a coalition with the UBP in December 2020. The party has remained in coalition with the UBP, and usually the YDP, since then.
At the time, he said, “if my party, which I led for years, cannot protect its own honour, my duty is to protect my own honour,” before sitting as an independent ‘MP’ until the 2022 election and not standing for re-election.
Last year, a total of 63 people in Kyrenia left the DP as part of a mass walkout led by the party’s Kyrenia district chairman Enver Hoca.
Hoca said that “unplanned actions that ignore all our warnings, trying to rule the party with the consent of just a couple of people, completely straying from the democratic approach, ignoring all the party’s hierarchy, failing to keep any promises to voters, and serving personal interests” were the reasons behind the party walkout.
After Tosunoglu’s resignation, 28 of the north’s 50 ‘MPs’ belong to the ruling coalition, with 24 belonging to the UBP, and two apiece belonging to the DP and the YDP.
Of the 22 in opposition, 19 belong to the CTP, and the remaining three are all independent.
The next ‘parliamentary’ elections will take place no later than February 2027, though no ‘parliament’ in the north has run its full term since 1998.
