In Pyla Square, there is a Turkish cafe with signs for EFES beer; a Greek cafe, with signs for KEO beer, and an English pub, with signs for both and some more. Above the latter stands a turret from which the United Nations flag flies: it is the headquarters of the blue helmet police.
Pyla is one of the few towns where Turks and Greeks from Cyprus live side by side. It is because it is located on the Green Line, the security zone patrolled by the UN that divides the Mediterranean island in two, with walls, barbed wire, turrets, armed soldiers, check-pointsand passport checks. And also with minefields. Although, citing sources from the Cypriot Government, the newspaper Cyprus Mailpublished this Sunday that the clearing of all anti-personnel mines in the separation area has been completed (not the anti-tank mines, considered “an integral part of the defense” of Cyprus). For most of the inhabitants of Pyla, the British, Slovaks and Argentines patrolling in military dress have become part of the landscape and they no longer pay attention to them. “But it’s still something that makes you sad,” adds the elder Periklis. It is a reflection of the uniqueness of Cyprus.
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of Cyprus’ entry into the EU. The fact that part of its population lives under the protection of the UN blue helmets has to do with the great anomaly of the country: a third of its territory is occupied by another who, to make matters worse, is a candidate for membership of the community club. , Turkey.
”This June 9 is a crucial moment, because we choose those who will maintain the European Union as a sustainable and stable project. And it is necessary to make the EU stronger, including security issues,” says Christiana Xenofontos, candidate of the center-right DISY party to the European Parliament. “Peace is very fragile. We have seen it in Ukraine and in Gaza, where a genocide is happening. And we see and experience it every day in Cyprus, where although we have a status quo“We don’t stop feeling insecure.” And he points to the other side of the wall, to the north, where Turkey has some 40,000 soldiers deployed.
Turkish soldiers landed in 1974 to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority from attacks by Greek ultranationalist organizations and from a coup d’état that sought the annexation of Cyprus to Greece. But the Turkish soldiers stayed, they have been on the island for 50 years and the partition of the country has been completed.
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It should not have been like this: the idea was that the reunification plan sponsored by the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, would be approved in the referendum of April 24, 2004 and, a week later, the entire island, new unified, enter the EU. However, the Greek Cypriots voted overwhelmingly against it after a change of heart by their leaders, the same ones who had approved the plan in previous negotiations. In Brussels the trick felt very bad, but the wheel was already in motion – Greece had threatened to veto the entry of the other nine countries that were to join the EU in 2004 if Cyprus was not allowed to enter, even if it were mutilated – So the EU incorporated the island, its walls, its barbed wire, its blue helmets and its unresolved conflict. And with no signs of it being resolved in the near future.
Successive rounds of negotiations have ended without result. The last, in 2017. And Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, richer, more militarily powerful and more nationalist than 20 years ago, is increasingly less willing to withdraw its soldiers and its control over the northern third of the island, especially since large reserves of underwater gas have been discovered off its coasts. This has had an impact on the vision of the EU. “Cypriots were the most enthusiastic about the EU, there were high expectations, but they have not materialized,” says Andreas Theophanous, from the University of Nicosia. The latest surveys indicate that up to 42% of Greek Cypriots see leaving the club favorably or partially, a Euroscepticism that this professor attributes to the fact that the EU “has tolerated Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus, and the Cypriots cannot “Avoid the temptation to compare it with the European reaction to Russian aggression in Ukraine.”
Cyprus’ journey in the EU has not been easy: in 2013 it had to apply a corralito and was subjected to the harsh supervision of the troika after the contagion of its financial system by the Greek crisis. In 2022, the entry into force of sanctions against Russia forced the bankruptcy of another of the large Cypriot banks and affected the island’s industries grown around Russian investment.
In reality, although some voters harbor a certain resentment towards Brussels, there are no major Eurosceptic movements among the main parties. They are chastened by Brexit in their former colonial metropolis, whose citizens, although they continue to come en masse to spend the summer in Cyprus, are spending less and less. Visits from Russians and Israelis, another source of tourist income, have also suffered. “There is a lot to do in terms of democratization of the EU, especially in economic issues. But don’t get out of it, look at the United Kingdom, they are going to be pulling their hair out for decades,” says Ángelos, a retiree.
The crucial Turkish Cypriot vote
Defying the heat that has hit Cyprus since the early hours of Saturday morning, Niyazi Kizilyürek and his team distribute leaflets in northern Nicosia and listen to the concerns of Turkish Cypriot voters. Like that of the Dinçer and Öykü couple, who cannot send her daughter to a Czech university where she has been accepted because the Government of Cyprus does not grant her a passport, claiming that her father is Turkish. “We Turkish Cypros are European citizens, but we cannot enjoy all our rights, and that creates dependence on Turkey,” laments Kizilyürek, the first Turkish Cypriot MEP in history, elected from the ranks of the Eurocommunist AKEL party in 2019 and who is repeating as a candidate.
Özer and Munise, two Turkish Cypriots from Pyla, make it clear: “We have no problems with the Greek Cypriots, we live in peace, but for them we remain second-class citizens. So we feel safer because Türkiye is here.”
The acquis communautaire – that is, the set of EU laws and regulations – only applies to the part of the island under effective control of the Republic of Cyprus, that is, the south. Even so, the around 100,000 Turkish Cypriots of legal age who have a Cypriot card can vote in the European elections, even if they live in the north. “The important thing about these elections is that they are the only ones in which Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots vote together, and that gives us the opportunity to improve ties between both communities. My campaign is bicommunal, on both sides of the island, in Greek and Turkish, and that creates a feeling of friendship,” says Kizilyürek: “I know that my colleagues in the Left group [en el Parlamento Europeo] “They are critical of the EU, and I share the criticism of the EU’s neoliberal economic policies, but for us it is a very important forum that contributes to peace and reconciliation in Cyprus.”
The advance of the extreme right
Depending on the participation of the Turkish Cypriots, the balance could tip towards AKEL (another pan-European formation, Volt, and the environmentalists also incorporate Turkish Cypriot candidates), which will compete for first place with the conservatives of DISY. But the other trend of these elections is, as in all of Europe, the advance of the extreme right.
Migration has become the main issue in the electoral debate. Since mid-May, around thirty migrants remain trapped in the separation zone controlled by the UN, enduring temperatures of 43 degrees, after trying to cross from the north and after the Greek Cypriot authorities refused to accept them (three have been evacuated to hospitals by the blue helmets). “We are not going to allow the opening of a new migratory route,” declared the Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulides, describing the arrival of migrants, behind which they see the hand of Turkey, as a “serious crisis.”
In the first four months of the year, 4,295 migrants arrived irregularly on the coasts of Cyprus, quadrupling the figures for the same period in the previous year, which was already a record. Cyprus has deployed patrol boats on its eastern coast, as the majority are Syrian refugees fleeing the increasingly desperate situation in neighboring Lebanon. All in all, the numbers of irregular arrivals are not so high compared to the Canary Islands or the Greek islands (Lesbos has already received more than all of Cyprus this year), but they have managed to put the matter in the spotlight.
And the far-right ELAM party has taken advantage of this, which polls place as the third force, with 13% of the vote. ELAM was founded as the island version of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, but since the leaders of the Greek parent were imprisoned for their criminal activities – murder, extortion, trafficking – the Greek Cypriot party has tried to move away from that image. Professor Theofanous also recalls that other parties have helped normalize the extremist group. He cites the case of DISY, which relied on their votes to elect the president of parliament. And that of the social democrats of EDEK, who participated in acts against immigration together with the extreme right.
“We are in a period in which the extreme right is growing throughout Europe. European democracy is in danger, including the EU project itself, because extremists do not want a united EU, they want a group of nation-states that only share a common market. So the democratic forces of Europe must unite,” says Kizilyürek. He knows what he is talking about: the far-right formations were the ones that started the intercommunal clashes and organized the 1974 coup d’état that, as a reaction, caused the invasion by Turkey.
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