Cyprus, the latest EU member state to take over the bloc’s revolving presidency, should not, according to the rules, be a member at all. Conditions outlined in the 1990s state that all new members must have established ‘good neighbourly relations’ as a criterion of acceptance – something that has recently hampered the accession of the states of the former Yugoslavia. Yet the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek-speaking half of the divided Mediterranean island, which took over the presidency in January, was accepted into the bloc in 2004, despite its continuing territorial dispute with the Turkish-speaking north of the island. Twenty-two years on, a resolution to its long-running conflict appears to have slipped out of reach forever, to the detriment of regional peace and security, Europe’s relations with Turkey, and, most of all, the people of Cyprus.

The Green Line, which has split the island since its internecine war of 1974, runs for more than a hundred miles across the breadth of the island, cutting straight through the capital, Nicosia. To cross, you must present your passport on both sides. Its aesthetics are militaristic, with blood-red warning signs and barbed wire lining either side. Cypriot and Turkish soldiers face each other across it (some 40,000 Turkish troops have been based in the north since Ankara sent its army into the conflict in 1974.) For Cypriots on both sides, its presence is a constant reminder of division and loss; once-mixed communities are now mono-ethnic, and many lost their homes and businesses as the population separated out. The island is scarred by abandoned mosques and churches, desecrated graveyards and the dead zone within the line itself.

The island’s division has shaped its fortunes on either side. The Republic of Cyprus in the south is a tourism hotspot, attracting around 4.5 million foreign visitors – a record number – in 2025. It is also a major shipping and logistics hub and, until recently, a centre of the golden passport industry, selling its citizenship in return for investments in its property sector. More than 7,000 people, many from Russia, bought Cypriot passports through the scheme before it was scrapped following a series of scandals in 2020.

The Republic is also connected to the West. On 2 March, two Iranian drones were intercepted as they targeted RAF Akrotiri, a British military base used for signals intelligence and, increasingly, western sorties in the Middle East. The attacks prompted calls from Cypriots for the British military to leave the island.

While the Republic of Cyprus is a part of the international community, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which unilaterally declared sovereignty in 1983, has stagnated. It is recognised only by Turkey itself; according to the Greek-speaking side, it is occupied territory. It is also stymied by embargoes – it was only in 2016, for instance, that Google maps began working there – and is propped up by Ankara in the form of subsidies and trade. That is bad for the approximately 380,000 people who live there, around half of whom are settlers from the Turkish mainland who arrived after 1974. So many original Turkish Cypriots have emigrated that their population in the UK is almost equal to that back in Cyprus.

There have been attempts at reunification over the decades, the most recent in 2017, when the two sides met in Crans-Montana, Switzerland; those negotiations collapsed with bitter recriminations on both sides. The surprise election of a new leader in the north, Tufan Erhurman, in October 2025, reignited brief hopes that peace talks could resume, but discussions are now framed around vaguer ambitions of dialogue and confidence building rather than reunification. Put bluntly, the Cypriots who remember their island before the split are dying out; the mean age on the island today is 38, meaning that the paradigm for the majority is division, not unity.

More salient still, Cyprus’ division is proving beneficial for President Erdoğan. The EU’s admission of the Republic of Cyprus in 2004 was a massive source of resentment for the Turkish leader; diplomats say that it was the moment when he turned from being a vocally pro-EU figure who advocated for Turkey’s accession, to a sceptic who believed the bloc was riddled with Turkophobia. Over the past decade, and particularly since the collapse of the Crans-Montana talks, he has weaponised the Cyprus issue in order to bolster his domestic electoral support.

Following the discovery of undersea gas reserves in Cypriot waters, President Erdoğan sent Turkish survey vessels and warships, ostensibly to secure the Turkish Cypriots’ rights to the proceeds; the jingoism was a handy distraction from economic problems back in Turkey, as well as useful way to frame himself as a strong leader who could stand up to enemies. In 2020, the Turkish intelligence services and the government in Ankara helped Ersin Tatar, an anti-reunification candidate, to victory in the north’s leadership elections; in office, he immediately set about trying to entrench the north’s separation and lobbied for its formal recognition among friendly states. Meanwhile, the north’s black economy provides a useful channel for Turkish money laundering, while its casinos attract scores of Turks (gambling is banned in Turkey). North Cyprus, for decades a client state, now finds itself as little more than an accessory of Erdoğan’s empire.

This should sound warning bells in Brussels. The EU is searching for ways to bring the former Yugoslav states, as well as Moldova and Ukraine, all of which have their own territorial disputes, into the bloc as a bulwark against Russian influence. The Republic of Cyprus, too, sits on prime geopolitical real estate, on the edge of the Middle East, and serves as a key western listening post – yet its accession to the EU did nothing to stop the malign spread of Russian influence there, and only inflamed the bloc’s relations with Turkey. European acceptance was meant to push Cyprus towards unification; two decades on, it has only driven the two sides further apart.