Second round of presidential elections started in Cyprus
Voters in Cyprus are going to the polls in a runoff ballot to decide who will be the country's next president, Aljazeera.com reports.
The race on Sunday pits incumbent Nicos Anastasiades, a conservative who won 35.5 percent in the first round, against Stavros Malas, a leftist-backed independent who came in second with 30.2 percent.
The winner will be expected to pick up the pieces of a suspended peace process on the ethnically split island, as well as oversee the economic recovery of a country still bouncing back from a crippling financial crisis.
A hardened politician, 71-year-old Anastasiades is a prominent figure of the Greek Cypriot political old guard with decades of experience. In contrast, Malas, a 50-year-old a geneticist, has been relatively absent from Cyprus's central political arena, even though he faced off Anastasiades - and lost - in the last presidential elections five years ago.
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