NICOSIA, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- Three opinion polls published on Friday ahead of presidential elections in Cyprus next weekend confirmed the commanding position of outgoing President Nicos Anastasiades, who is seeking a second term.
The polls are the last allowed to be published under Cypriot law before the elections in 10 days.
A poll by state-run Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation, traditionally considered as the most reliable, shows center-right candidate Anastasiades leading the pack against nine presidential aspirants, with 42 percent in the first round on Jan. 28.
A much more interesting finding of two of the polls is that leftist candidate Stavros Malas, who is supported by the left-wing AKEL party, has for the first time overtaken center-right candidate Nicolas Papadopoulos, who had been shown in second position in all previous polls.
If polls are confirmed, Malas will garner about 25 percent of the vote in the first round with Papadopoulos in third place with about 22 percent.
In the event Papadopoulos is pushed out of the run-off election race on Feb. 4, there will be a repeat of the 2013 election when Anastasiades beat Malas with about 57 percent.
Only this time polls say Anastasiades will have an even easier time winning the election with 65 percent of the vote.
With Papadopoulos in the race, Anastasiades is predicted to carry the election with about 60 percent of the vote.
The difference is attributed to the fact that many Papadopoulos voters would find it hard to vote in the run-off election for left-winger Malas, who as a health minister in the previous AKEL government is considered to share responsibility for the near bankruptcy of the Cypriot economy in 2013.
On the other hand, more Malas voters are projected to vote for centrist Papadopoulos in the run-off election rather than center-right Anastasiades, who is considered by AKEL voters as the arch-foe of their party.
This is a strange discrepancy, as Anastasiades and his former party DISY and AKEL have very similar positions on the kind of a settlement agreement on the long-standing Cyprus problem to reunify the divided island, the central issue in the electoral campaign.
DISY and AKEL favor a federal state solution in which Greek and Turkish Cypriots will share power, whereas Papadopoulos opposes a federal solution.
