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Three days before the presidential and legislative elections in Turkey, one of the three candidates who were going to face Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday May 14 has announced that he is withdrawing from the race. Muharrem Ince had been accused for several weeks of dispersing opposition votes.
With Anne Andlauer, RFI correspondent in Istanbul
This is bad news for Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But good news for his main rival, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, who has risen to the head of a broad alliance of opposition parties. Muharrem Ince is a dissident of this alliance and his supporters are likely to go over to Mr. Kiliçdaroglu.
He was soundly defeated by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the last 2018 presidential election and accused of dispersing opposition votes and diminishing Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s chances of a single-round victory. Therefore, the abandonment of him increases, in theory, the chances that the opposition win on Sunday.
without voting instructions
In announcing his withdrawal from the electoral race, Muharrem Ince did not ask for a vote for Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. She cited smear campaigns against him, video montages wrongly accusing him of adultery. And not only does he not give voting instructions, but he explains that, with his withdrawal, when the opposition loses the elections, they will not be able to use him as a pretext.
The question now is to what extent supporters of Muharrem Ince will switch their vote for Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on Sunday. A poll by the Konda Institute, one of the most reputable, gave him 49.3% of the vote this morning, compared to 43.7% for Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Muharrem Ince got 2.2% of the vote. One last candidate, the ultra-nationalist Sinan Ogan, got just under 5%.
