Turkey decides this Sunday whether to extend the mandate of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for five more years, who is already the second most influential leader in modern Turkish history, only behind the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the second president who has been at the head of the country the longest (20 years). only behind Ismet Inönü (who was Atatürk's right-hand man and successor).
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It will also be the first time in history that Turkey faces a second round in a presidential election. This voting system is relatively new – until 2014 the president was elected by parliament – but, in the two previous elections, Erdogan clearly won by obtaining 52% of the vote in the first round and between 14 and 20 points ahead of the second most voted candidate. On this occasion, when the polls closed on May 14, the advantage was reduced to 4.5 points, although Erdogan continues to start in a better position having gathered 49.5% of the votes in the first round compared to 44.9% of his main rival, the center-left politician and candidate of the opposition alliance, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
Despite the difficulty of overcoming the result, the opposition has not thrown in the towel. In the brief campaign for the second round, the opposition candidate has left behind the positive narrative he had maintained so far and has reinforced the nationalist and anti-immigrant discourse, filling the cities with posters promoting the expulsion of Syrian refugees, turned into scapegoats for high prices and lack of jobs. The idea is to attract those who did not go to the polls on May 14 and voters of the third candidate in support, Sinan Ogan, who in the first round garnered 5.2% of the ballots. Ogan has ended up backing Erdogan to favor "stability", since the coalition that supports the current president obtained an absolute majority in Parliament.
Some analysts say that he opted for the current president after the mediation of the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Ogan worked in Baku and maintains close ties with the Caucasian country because he comes from the Azeri minority in northeastern Turkey. Not surprisingly, Aliyev has sent some Azerbaijani deputies to these Turkish provinces to campaign for Erdogan, according to a parliamentarian of the Republican People's Party (CHP) from Kiliçdaroglu.
However, the parties that supported Ogan in the first round – ultra-nationalist but secular – have given their support to Kiliçdaroglu. The xenophobic politician Umit Özdag has signed with the opposition candidate a protocol by which, if he wins the elections, he undertakes to expel the refugees "within a year", to "strengthen his fight against terrorism" – including that of the Kurdish armed group PKK – and not to modify the fundamental articles of the Constitution. This has left the Kurdish nationalist left, one of the pillars of the Kiliçdaroglu vote, in an awkward position, despite which its leaders have certified that they continue to support the opposition candidate. It remains to be seen whether their voters will follow, especially considering that, in the first round, the Kurdish provinces registered a turnout ten points lower than the country's average.
It is likely that the Turkish ultranationalist vote will be divided between the two candidates (there are parties of this tendency that support Erdogan and others that support Kiliçdaroglu), predictably around the secularism-Islamism axis. "I voted for Ogan in the first round, but I would never vote for Erdogan because I am a defender of Atatürk," a promoter of secularism, a voter explained to this newspaper.
Most polls released in the last week give Erdogan as the clear winner with between 51.4% and 54% of the vote. In the first round almost all foresaw that it would be necessary to go to a second round, but they failed miserably in the level of support of each candidate: they gave Kiliçdaroglu much more intention to vote than he finally had.
"We are ready to bury them this Sunday!" exclaimed Erdogan at one of his last rallies, although he also warned against complacency: "Our main rival is not the leader of the CHP, but passivity, the drunkenness of success and thinking that we have won it." For this reason, and also in order to mobilize the nationalist vote, Erdogan has continued to insist on the alleged alliance between the opposition and "the terrorists", using in rallies and television programs a montage in which the head of the PKK seems to participate in Kiliçdaroglu's election announcement.
However, the crudeness of the manipulated video has led even journalists from pro-government channels to question representatives of the Executive about it: the Minister of the Environment, Murat Kurum, had to spend moments of blush trying to justify that in his party they did not know if the video was true or false, while the Government spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, acknowledged that "it is edited", although he defended: "Its essence is truth".
Like complacency in the government camp, disenchantment could also work against Kiliçdaroglu. "The results [of the first round] have caused disillusionment among opposition voters. However, this is not due to the actual results, but to a false expectation created by the surveys," says Baris Tugrul, Professor of Sociology of Communication at Hacettepe University. "And this disillusionment has been taken advantage of by Erdogan to declare his supposed victory. I call it a supposed victory because both Erdogan's AKP party and its main ally, the ultranationalist MHP, have lost voters compared to the previous elections and the president himself has not been able to win in the first round."
Azerbaijan's support has not been the only foreign aid Erdogan has received. "Some Gulf states and others have put money into our system. This has happened recently and has relieved our central bank and the market, albeit temporarily," the Islamist president said Thursday.
The central bank is badly in need of foreign funds because it has been selling foreign currency in large quantities to keep the value of the lira stable until the election period passes and counteract the heterodox monetary policies advocated by Erdogan and that, during his last term, have caused the Turkish currency to lose almost 80% of its value. Indeed, for the first time in two decades, the Turkish central bank's net foreign exchange reserves have entered negative territory. The strong demand for foreign currency among Turks – in anticipation of the blow that the Turkish lira may suffer on Monday – has also contributed to this situation, since Erdogan has promised that he will continue on the same economic and monetary path.
Turkey CB net international reserves turn negative for the first time since 2002 *** pic.twitter.com/q4e6LALPC1
— Emre Akcakmak (@akcakmak) May 25, 2023
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