Divided but Ever Strategic, Cyprus Gets a New President

A former foreign minister of Cyprus, Nikos Christodoulides, was elected as the new president in a runoff Sunday, pledging to revive stalemated reunification talks with the nation’s breakaway Turkish Cypriots and to form a coalition government with women filling half of the cabinet positions.With all ballots counted, Mr. Christodoulides had 51.9 percent of the vote and his runoff rival, veteran diplomat Andreas Mavroyiannis, had 48.1 percent, according to official election results. Mr. Mavroyiannis conceded defeat before the vote tally was complete.Mr. Christodoulides, 49, campaigned as a unifying force for ethnically divided Cyprus, eschewing ideological and party divisions. His message resonated with a wide swath of voters.Mr. Mavroyiannis, who previously served as Cyprus’s ambassador to the United Nations, had positioned himself as the agent of change, ushering in a new political era following a decade of rule by the outgoing president, Nicos Anastasiades.He ran as an independent, but the support he received from the communist-rooted AKEL party, the country’s second-largest political party, may have pushed swing voters into backing Mr. Christodoulides.Mr. Christodoulides appeared to have won with support from members of the Democratic Rally party, known as DISY, whose leader, Averof Neophytou, failed to make it into the runoff. The DISY leadership decided not to formally back either candidate and left it to members of the country’s largest party to vote as they saw fit.Many DISY party insiders had blamed Mr. Christodoulides, a long-time party member, for running against Mr. Neophytou and splitting the party vote. However, many did not want the AKEL, Mr. Mavroyiannis’s main backer, to regain a foothold in government and feared the diplomat becoming the next president of Cyprus would threaten the country’s fragile economy and pro-Western trajectory.Critics fault AKEL for bringing Cyprus to the brink of bankruptcy a decade ago and for maintaining a pro-Moscow slant. Amid the bickering within DISY, Mr. Anastasiades, a former party leader, took the unusual step of issuing a statement suggesting that DISY members should work to thwart an AKEL-backed government.He urged the party’s voters to safeguard the island’s Western orientation and its deepening alliance with Washington.Mr. Christodoulides said he has already received congratulatory messages from world leaders including President Macron and the Democratic senator of New Jersey who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez.“Our country’s European, Western orientation is our steady compass for tomorrow,” Mr. Christodoulides said.He inherits the challenge of trying to restart moribund peace talks with the country’s Turkish Cypriots, who declared independence nearly a decade after a 1974 Turkish invasion that followed a coup aimed at union with Greece.The island’s reunification has eluded politicians during nearly a half-century of negotiations, despite progress on the shape of an overall peace deal. A potential resolution became more complicated following the 2017 collapse of talks at a Swiss resort that many believed had come tantalizingly close to producing a breakthrough.Turkey, the only country to recognize the minority Turkish Cypriots’ independence, has since turned its back on a United Nations-backed arrangement for a federated Cyprus. It advocates instead a two-state deal, which the UN, the European Union, America, and other countries have rejected.As the government spokesman and Mr. Anastasiades’s close confidant at the time, Mr. Christodoulides was a key insider during the failed peace drive in Switzerland. He blamed Turkey’s insistence on maintaining a permanent troop presence and military intervention rights in a reunified Cyprus as the main reason the negotiations unraveled.Mr. Christodoulides has said he draws the line at those two Turkish demands but would utilize Cyprus’s European Union membership to engage with Ankara on ways to break the current deadlock. “The current state of affairs cannot be considered a solution to the Cyprus issue, and I have expressed my readiness to make use of our European Union membership to break the deadlock and lead us to a settlement as quickly as possible, to reunify our homeland,” Mr. Christodoulides said from his campaign headquarters, flanked by his wife and four daughters.Whether Brussels will prove to be of any real utility in bringing the Cyprus problem to a satisfactory resolution for all sides remains to be seen, and could be a tall order. Britain, along with Greece and Turkey, is one of the guarantor powers of Cyprus, which became an independent country only in 1960 after decades of generally prosperous colonial rule. Britain still maintains two large sovereign base areas on the strategically located island, and the country wields considerable power behind the scenes.Last October, Washington lifted an arms embargo on the Republic of Cyprus, following efforts to do so that began under the Trump administration. That augurs the potential for a bigger American role in replacing the uneasy stalemate that prevails on the island with a lasting peace agreement, especially with a view to 2024.

Divided but Ever Strategic, Cyprus Gets a New President

Divided but Ever Strategic, Cyprus Gets a New President

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