Türkiye – The second round of the Turkish presidential elections, between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, will take place on Sunday, after a campaign finale marked by the migration issue and the presence in the country of millions of Syrians fleeing the war. The pertinent question is what will happen with abstention.
The electoral showdown comes two weeks after the first round gave Erdogan just 0.5% less than 50% of the votes needed for an outright victory.
Turkey is preparing for a second round, this Sunday, May 28, to elect its president at the end of a bitter campaign, full of promises and condemnations from both sides against Kurds and Syrian refugees.
Emotion overtook the economy in Turkey’s 2023 presidential campaign, forcing the opposition to embrace nationalism ahead of Sunday’s runoff. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was ahead of the game, using a mix of nationalist rhetoric, pan-Islamic heroism and historical references in a bid to enter his third decade in power.
For this new face-to-face, Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives after the first round with an advantage of five points (49.5%) and 2.5 million votes over his rival, the Social Democrat Kemal Kilcdaroglu (45%), at the head of a disparate alliance of six parties, ranging from the national right to the left. The latest polls – which were wrong before the first round – also give a similar advantage of five points to the head of state.
Despite this a priori arithmetic favorable to the president in power for twenty years, one unknown remains: the 8.3 million votes that were not expressed in the first round, despite a turnout of 87%.
The diaspora that was able to vote until Tuesday night moved more this time: with 1.9 million votes against 1.69 million. In addition to abstentionists, both camps have since May 14 courted ultranationalists, including the third man in the first round, Sinan Ogan, who won 5% of the votes cast and eventually joined Erdogan. However, the weight of these extremes played into the tone of the campaign.
Obviously stunned by a loss he had not anticipated, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 74, disappeared from screens the day after May 14, only to reappear on matchday four. The smiles that accompanied their meetings ended, instead the clenched fist appeared to announce the expulsion of Syrian refugees “from the day after the victory.”
A threat that he repeated days later, when he promised that Turkey would not become “a repository for immigrants.” Since then, the candidate has softened his comments towards the Syrians and has asked Europe to pay its fair share: “We are fighting these problems to give Europe peace of mind, we are going to remedy them, you will see,” he said.
Turkey, with at least 3.4 million Syrian refugees (according to official data) and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iranians and Iraqis, is the first host country for these in the world.
For his part, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 69, stimulated by the result of the first round, held rallies – up to three newspapers last weekend – long denouncing the “terrorists” from the opposing camp, guilty of the support they are given the pro-Kurdish party HDP and “LGBTIQ+”, who attack the fundamental values of the family.
“Yesterday again they adored the terrorists,” said the president against the opposition.
Erdogan accused of blocking his rival’s text messages
“I have been following electoral campaigns for decades, I have never seen so many ‘fake news’, such insulting and homophobic comments,” observes Can Dündar, former director of the center-left newspaper Cumhuriyet, in exile in Berlin, who regrets that the opposition has not ” given an appropriate response or asked for a minimum of respect”.
Menderes Cinar, a professor of political science at Ankara’s Baskent University, is saddened even by an “opposition unable to present its vision of the future of Turkey, relying solely on the failures of the government and the president.”
“But even if voters disagree with some parties in the coalition, they can’t afford not to vote,” he said.
Something that the HDP, pro-Kurdish, has integrated well. Despite repeated attacks and, above all, Kilicdaroglu’s alliance with a tiny ultra-reactionary and xenophobic party, the party on Thursday renewed its call to vote for Kilicdaroglu.
On Twitter, one of the HDP figures, Selahattin Demirtas, jailed since 2016, reiterated his call from his cell: “There is no third round in this case! Let’s make Kilicdaroglu president, let Turkey breathe. Go to the polls, vote !”
On Friday night, Kilicdaroglu accused the authorities of having blocked text messages in which he wanted to warn journalists about his participation in a live program on the private Fox television channel.
According to him, “the blocking was carried out by the Information and Communications Technology Supervisory Authority (BTS) on the orders of Erdogan.” “They blocked text messages because they are afraid,” he denounced live.
In a press release, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) organization denounced the imbalance in the media when the head of state monopolizes the television screens.
“The truth is that the established media system constitutes a massive manipulation of the elections by depriving Turkish citizens of democratic deliberation,” said RSF representative in Turkey, Erol Onderoglu.
With AFP and original note from France24
