NICOSIA — Former Cypriot Foreign Minister Nikos Christodoulides led the first round of voting for the country’s presidency on Sunday and faces a runoff next week against second-place finisher Andreas Mavroyiannis, a career diplomat.
In a record field of 14 candidates, Christodoulides won 32 percent of the votes, according to results announced by state broadcaster of Cyprus, while Mavroyiannis received just under 30 percent. Since no candidate won an outright majority of the vote, the top two finishers will go head-to-head in a runoff on February 12.
Christodoulides is from the ruling right-wing Democratic Rally party (DISY), but is running as an independent. Mavroyiannis is running as an independent with the backing of the communist-rooted AKEL party.
The two frontrunners now have a week to attract the voters of the 12 candidates that were eliminated in the first round. Some 561,000 citizens are eligible to vote.
The next president will have difficult challenges over the five-year term: steering the country through evolving geopolitics; tackling growing financial woes and a surge in migration; improving a national image stained by corruption scandals; and finding a way to break a deadlock in the reunification talks on the ethnically split Cyprus.
The winner will succeed outgoing conservative President Nicos Anastasiades, who has been at the helm of the Mediterranean island for a decade. All the main candidates have been close associates of Anastasiades for the last decade.
Anastasiades’ tenure has been marred by corruption allegations, especially for the controversial “Golden Visa” program, which gave foreigners a passport in exchange for investment in the country. Recipients included people involved in money laundering and other criminal activities. At least 1,000 Russians received Cypriot citizenship this way, before the program was suspended in 2020.
The 49-year-old Christodoulides served as government spokesman and then foreign minister under Anastasiades. He broke ranks with his own party DISY and its leader, Averof Neofytou, thus splitting the conservative vote. He is considered a hardliner regarding the Cyprus reunification issue and is also backed by centrist parties and parties less flexible in the reunification talks.
Mavroyiannis, 66, was Anastasiades’ chief negotiator in reunification talks with Turkish Cypriots. Before that he served as Cypriot ambassador to the United Nations, France and Ireland. During the campaign, he promised to turn the page and change Cyprus’ tarnished image, as well as to focus on restarting reunification talks.
DISY leader Neofytou, who gathered 26 percent of the vote on Sunday, took the party’s reins from Anastasiades a decade ago. DISY’s failure to make it to the second round is highly damaging to the ruling party and Neofytou is expected to bear the blame for insisting on running despite the fact that polls were not in his favor.
Cyprus has been divided into a Turkish Cypriot north and a Greek Cypriot south since Turkey’s 1974 invasion, which came in response to a Greece-backed coup. Ankara does not recognize the Republic of Cyprus, an EU member state that is otherwise recognized internationally as the sole sovereign authority over the whole island. Several attempts to find a compromise settlement over the years have failed, the last one in 2017.
The Turkish north has toughened its stance since the election of leader Ersin Tatar in 2020, a hardliner insisting on a two-state solution, even as the United Nations continue to push for a bi-communal federation.
