The future of Turkey will be played on May 28, when the current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu will go to the runoff.
Erdogan’s challenger is the head of the main opposition party, the CHP (Republican People’s Party), founded by Ataturk. He managed to create for the first time a “National Alliance” composed of six very heterogeneous parties, from the nationalists on the left, from the Kurds to the Greens, with the common goal of ousting Erdogan from power.
The main accusations in his spots are against the rival for the failure in the economy and the increase in inflation.
Turkey has 85 million people, the second largest army in NATO and has catastrophic inflation that has exceeded 80 percent.
In the first round on Sunday, May 14, Erdogan received 49.2% of preferences, just below the threshold for election. Kilicdaroglu stopped at 45%, clearly highlighting the deep polarization of Turkish society.
All eyes in the two weeks between the two rounds are on the voters of Sinan Ogan, the independent candidate of the nationalist right, who received just over 5% of the vote.
In theory, his positions are closer to those of Erdogan, especially when it comes to dealing with the Kurdish issue.
Ogan comes from the MHP, the nationalist movement that supports the current president. But precisely the disagreements with the old party may push Ogan to give indications to his followers in favor of Kilicdaroglu.
However, what will happen remains difficult to decipher. Meanwhile, abroad, the second round of elections in Turkey has already begun.
Erdogan will play the political stability card after the result of the legislative elections, in which his Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the partial main winner with 268 seats, and will be able to keep the majority in the National Assembly to form a government with his partners, the main one being the Party for the Nationalist Movement.
And yet, for many Turkish citizens, the dilemma will be the same as on May 14: either vote to see Erdogan stay in power or choose change regardless of the outcome of the legislative elections.
Since Erdogan reformed the constitution by empowering the presidential role in the executive presidency (a reform that allowed him to continue to lead the country for another ten years after his first decade as prime minister), it is the first time that Turkey has gone in the polls.
These elections in Turkey are thought to be important both for the course of democracy in the country and for the orientation of Turkish foreign policy.
Kilicdaroglu, economist and leader of the Republican People’s Party, managed to unite the HDP Kurds in an alliance of moderates and nationalists, greens and leftists. Together with them, also the influential mayors of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamglu and Ankara, Mansur Yavas.
Imamglu and Yavas were the first to accuse the state news agency Anadolu of trying to influence the vote.
Despite the unification of several parties (with different souls and a cross electoral base) around the Presidential candidate, who had lost to Erdogan several times in the past, the main opposition in Turkey aimed at ousting the Reis from throne, failed to convince the majority of citizens that he could offer a credible political alternative.
The May 14 result that gave Erdogan’s alliance a majority of seats in parliament already limits the opposition’s ability to implement its program, even if its leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, wins the second round of presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Erdoğan continues to talk about populist measures such as increasing the salaries of the public administration, as well as with a rhetoric that is addressed not only to conservatives, but also to traditionalists.
If the behavior of voters is to be analyzed, some Turkish cities, such as Ankara, Istanbul, but also Izmir and Van seem to be clearly against Tayyip Erdogan, voting for Kilicdaroglu in the hope of political change. The deterioration of the macroeconomic situation and the weakening of civil rights seem to have had a critical role in the final decision of Turkish citizens in these areas.
The new element that emerges from what has been observed in the past precisely in this geographical division, where Erdogan is more popular in rural and conservative areas in the interior of the Aegean, in the Western Black Sea and in central Anatolia (where clientelism and the religious element are perhaps more important than the economic and political crisis), is the emergence of the Green Left Party.
In eastern Turkey, and especially in provinces with a large Kurdish population, citizens who voted for the Left Green Party, under which the People’s Democratic Party is running, showed a preference for Kilicdaroglu. Although according to the calculations, the Kurds were important in the vote, but they were not the determining factor.
In the uncertainty of a result for May 28, it is not clear what changes the victory of the opposition leader would bring. Kilicdaroglu is unlikely to give up the powers of the executive presidency. Especially now that the AKP alliance has won most of the seats in the Assembly.
Kilicdaroglu has promised to restore the independence of the central bank, the courts and the diplomatic corps, but how far he will be able to advance his platform in the event of victory there is still no guarantee.
He would try to bring Turkey closer to NATO and then to the EU, with which the situation has been frozen for years.
But anyway, after the parliamentary elections, continuity is what is expected in Turkish foreign policy, not forgetting that Turkey under Erdogan’s leadership, in recent months, has improved relations with Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
One of the main problems, the Cypriot one and the disputes with Greece about the islands and gas resource areas in the eastern Mediterranean, would remain the same again. In the platform of the Alliance it is written that “Turkey will pursue the objectives of protecting the acquired rights of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”.
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Ankara, with which it wants to govern, will never accept a greater role of the EU in Mediterranean affairs.
Moreover, in the medium term, tension with the United States over the American presence in Cyprus, following the lifting of the US arms embargo, is also likely to increase.
Tension which has characterized the relations between the two countries for years.
Erdogan has previously accused the United States of protecting Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen in Pennsylvania, who he says was the mastermind of the failed coup in 2016.
Also the issue of F-35 fighter jets has been a cause of contrast. Washington has opposed Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system and has therefore refused Turkey since 2019 the delivery of F-35 fighter jets, which are paid for.
There is no possibility of the withdrawal of the Turkish troops stationed in the anti-Kurdish function against the YPG on the border with Syria, in the event of a victory by Kilicdaroglu.
Read also: It’s Time For An Independent Kurdistan
The hope was to see Erdogan knocked out in the first round. This did not happen and the chances that the runoff could reconfirm the president are high.
Meanwhile, the economy was the first responder to the election result. On the morning of May 15, the reaction of the Turkish lira was negative on the stock exchange. Turkish stocks and bonds fell as the cost of insuring government debt against default rose as interest rates were kept below inflation.
The 2001 boom, facilitated by the previous government’s policies, is now a story of the past.
If the opposition wins, it will face difficult tasks regarding the economy.
But if Erdogan loses, the risk that European banks will pay is real, given that many of them are highly exposed in the country. According to Bloomberg, despite the reductions made, Spanish, French, British and German banks still have investments worth billions.
Awaiting the result of May 28, the polls (it is not known how reliable) give Erdogan an advantage and leave little room for surprises.
However, in the event of a victory by the opposition, the characteristic will be more continuity, without any major strategic upheaval, with various political crises from time to time.
