Cypriot conservative leader Nicos Anastasiades won an overwhelming victory in a presidential run-off election yesterday, boosting hopes of a swift financial rescue for the near-bankrupt island nation.

Tiny Cyprus has emerged as a big headache for the eurozone in recent months, triggering fears the island could plunge into a financial meltdown that reignites the bloc’s debt crisis. A bailout has proved elusive eight months since talks began.

Anastasiades, who has pledged to hammer out a quick deal with foreign lenders, took 57.5 per cent of the vote, 15 points ahead of his Communist-backed rival Stavros Malas, who campaigned on an anti-austerity platform.

He will take the reins of a Mediterranean nation ravaged by its worst economic crisis in four decades.

Jubilant supporters waved Greek and Cypriot flags, honked car horns and set off flares in Nicosia as the results came in.

“It’s a triumph,” said Stefanos Stefanou, a 62-year-old pensioner as he stood outside Anastasiades’s campaign offices. “I won’t have the fear of losing my pension and benefits now, along with what we earned after working for 40 years.”

“We need a government with weight that can talk to (EU) partners, that is cooperative, that can be heard and do what it pledges to do,” Christopher Pissarides, a Cypriot who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2010, said.

“I would expect the markets, and business, to welcome Anastasiades’s victory because he knows the rules of the game very well,” said Stelios Platis, an economist and independent consultant.

Financial markets had been hoping for an Anastasiades victory to speed up a joint rescue by the EU and International Monetary Fund before the island runs out of cash and derails fragile confidence returning to the eurozone.