NICOSIA — Hardliner Dervis Eroglu won the Turkish Cypriot presidential election Sunday on the divided island of Cyprus, ousting pro-settlement candidate Mehmet Ali Talat but vowing to work for a peace deal.
"No-one must think that I will walk away from the negotiating table ... The talks process will continue," Eroglu told Turkey's NTV television.
"I will work with goodwill for a solution that takes my community's rights into account," he said, adding that he would have "close talks with the mother country" Turkey, which keeps a 35,000-strong garrison in northern Cyprus.
With all votes counted, right-wing National Unity Party (UBP) chief Eroglu, 72, who has served several terms as premier, secured 50.4 percent of the vote, while incumbent president Mehmet Ali Talat won 42.8 percent.
The electoral commission in the self-declared breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognised only by Ankara, put turnout at a high 75 percent of the 164,000 registered voters.
Five other candidates contested the poll.
The triumph of Eroglu, who was tipped win in opinion polls, was greeted by an explosion of joy among his supporters outside UBP headquarters in northern Nicosia, as fireworks crackled and boomed in the night sky.
"We will search for a way to reach consensus" in the talks with the Greek Cypriots, Eroglu told supporters, his wife Meral by his side.
Despite his hardline credentials, Eroglu vowed during the campaign to carry on the UN-brokered peace process with the island's majority Greek Cypriots in the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, which is an EU member state.
The opinion polls had indicated that disappointment at the lack of progress in the peace talks, together with the TRNC's ongoing political and economic isolation and accusations of nepotism, undermined support for Talat.
Eroglu's UBP already defeated the leftist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) formerly headed by Talat, 58, in the Turkish Cypriot legislative election of April 2009.
Talat has held 19 months of reunification talks with President Demetris Christofias, the Greek Cypriot leader.
The talks launched in September 2008 are predicated on a federal solution, with distinct geographical zones for the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities.
Eroglu has for years favoured a two-state solution, which is vehemently rejected as tantamount to partition by the Greek Cypriots.
Last month, Christofias and Talat announced important progress in the talks and vowed to reach a comprehensive settlement this year in a move that was widely seen as a bid to boost the latter's election prospects.
But the two sides remain far apart on the key issues of property and security.
Turkish mainland troops occupied the northern third of Cyprus in 1974 in response to a short-lived Greek Cypriot coup backed by the junta then ruling Athens aimed at union with Greece.
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