Istanbul, election posters for the presidential elections © tolga ildun/Shutterstock
On Sunday 28 May, citizens will elect the government that will lead Turkey on the second centenary of the founding of its republic in the presidential run-off. Brief analysis of the new alliances on the eve of the second round
“Don’t worry, we’ll win in the second round.” So Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and opposition candidate for president, spoke to “Babala TV”, un channel video Youtube quite popular among young adults in urban areas, four days before the May 28 ballot. The program hosted by Kılıçdaroğlu, lasted over 4 hours and was viewed by 7.9 million users in the first 10 hours of its online release. An interest that can also be justified by the almost total absence of the politician – and of the opposition in general – from state television networks and most of the private ones.
But, regardless of the reassurances of the opposition candidate, the electoral result is far from obvious and according to the organization of polls KONDA – whose predictions for the first consultations gave Kılıçdaroğlu erroneously in the lead – the outgoing president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan he could receive 52.7% of the votes, securing the lead of the country for the sixth time (3 as prime minister and 3 as president).
Over the past two weeks, the two remaining contenders, Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan, have conducted meetings and negotiations to raise their first-round percentages to 44.88% and 49.52% respectively. The main objective of the two politicians was to attract the consent of Sinan Oğan’s voters, who had presented himself as the third presidential candidate in the first round, surprisingly obtaining 5.2% of the votes.
Oğan – a politician already ousted twice by the Ultranationalist Action Party (MHP) and not belonging to any party – was supported by the alliance of parties that supported his candidacy, the ATA Coalition, led by the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi) on whose leader, Ümit Özdağ is also a former member of the MHP.
At the heart of the electoral campaign carried out by Oğan and Özdağ is the strong opposition to the millions of refugees and migrants living in Turkey and with regard to whom Erdoğan’s government has long adopted an “open door” policy, which has also proved useful to the EU which, since 2016, has found in Ankara a partner with which to carry out its program of outsourcing the management of the “refugee problem”.
The second element of the ATA coalition’s campaign was the hostility to Kurdish identity claims, embodied – in the current political set-up of the country – by the pro-Kurdish party HDP/Yesil Sol, an external ally of Kılıçdaroğlu, and HÜDAPAR – the radical Islamist Kurdish party and advocate of limiting women’s rights – who joined Erdoğan’s “People’s coalition” instead.
Oğan had harshly criticized Erdoğan’s government, promising to put an end to the dictatorial management of the country, and had also rejected the prospect of having to choose an alliance that had pro-Kurdish formations among its partners. And yet Oğan, who defines himself as a follower of the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, seems to have put aside these reticence, ultimately deciding to join the coalition of the outgoing president.
The right-wing anti-immigrant coalition therefore split, with Özdağ switching to Kılıçdaroğlu’s side, leading the latter to adopt a rhetoric that targeted the millions of Syrian and non-Syrian migrants and refugees living in Turkey and promising even mass expulsions. Measures of this type had already been included in the opposition’s electoral programme, but during the election campaign the CHP leader had preferred to focus on economic issues. The threatening tones, and little in tune with the promises of wanting to transform Turkey into a more democratic country, have inevitably created criticism among the more progressive electorate of the presidential candidate, despite this rhetoric being supported by a large portion of the population.
Özdağ has also imposed on the coalition that supports Kılıçdaroğlu a condition that directly concerns the HDP, namely that of maintaining the practice of placing local administrators in receivership, which has become a constant in the last years of the Erdoğan government. The commissioner is justified by the alleged complicity of the pro-Kurdish administrations with terrorist organizations. To date, 65 HDP mayors have been replaced with government-appointed administrators. The agreement reached between Özdağ and Kılıçdaroğlu foresees that the practice will continue, provided however that the “terrorist ties” are proven in legal proceedings.
Despite the swerve to the right by the opposition leader, the pro-Kurdish HDP/Yesil Sol, who supported Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy from outside in the first round, he nevertheless decided to maintain his support, albeit justifying his choice not as an explicit support for Kılıçdaroğlu, but as an act necessary to put an end to “the regime of the man-only in command”.
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