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The coalition of the six most important Turkish opposition parties has found a agreement to support a single candidate in the presidential elections on May 14: he is the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), his name is Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, he is 74 years old and will be the main candidate against the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in office since 2014. Up until that year, Erdoğan had been prime minister continuously since 2003.
Kılıçdaroğlu is a former civil servant and heads the second largest party in the country after Erdoğan’s, the CHP: he has moderate leftist positions and is openly secular. It is the party founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey and considered the founding father of the country.
After the news of his candidacy, Kılıçdaroğlu he said that his “goal is to lead the country to days of prosperity, peace and joy”. He has also promised to govern Turkey through “consensus and consultation” and has declared that he intends to return to a parliamentary system, after the presidential turn initiated by Erdogan in 2018.
Polls say that the results of next May’s elections will not be taken for granted: the bloc made up of the opposition is in fact for now having a slight advantage over the alliance currently in government. Kılıçdaroğlu could be favored by the economic crisis that the country is going through, by the increase in inflation and by the management of the earthquake that occurred in Turkey and Syria a few weeks ago, which has so far caused the death of more than 46 thousand people. Erdoğan has been accused of not having reacted quickly enough, quickly sending the necessary aid to the affected territories, and in general of not having been sufficiently prepared for such an event, even though his country is notoriously very prone to earthquakes.
– Read also: How to help earthquake victims in Syria and Turkey, from here
An investigation was also launched after the earthquake to verify how uncontrolled building development may have contributed to the thousands of deaths. In recent decades, building development has been an important factor in the country’s economic growth, but it has often occurred in an uncontrolled and speculative manner. Even though the Turkish authorities had tried to bring the buildings up to standard, the parliament approved numerous amnesties, which have actually encouraged unauthorized building in the country. And opposition parties have accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of being partly responsible for what happened. Despite this, and despite having a broad alliance against him made up of six opposition parties, Erdoğan still enjoys some popularity.
The decision to support Kılıçdaroğlu came after the opposition coalition had split in recent days over the exit of the nationalist party IYI, opposed to the choice of the CHP leader as Erdoğan’s challenger. The coalition reassembled in the following days, after Kılıçdaroğlu accepted the IYI’s proposal to nominate Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, popular mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, winners of the 2019 local elections, as vice-presidential candidates.
The elections in Turkey will probably have global repercussions: Erdoğan is considered one of the most extremist leaders in the Western world and in recent years he has put his allies in NATO – the mutual defense organization of which 30 western countries – maintaining complicit relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.