Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing the biggest test in his two-decade rule, although he still remains a formidable candidate.
Opinion polls show that Erdogan’s AKP party and his nationalistic allies, the MHP, will secure 45 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, almost the same percentage as the six-party opposition bloc.
However, in the presidential elections, to be held at the same time on 14 May, the joint candidate of the opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, nicknamed Turkey’s Gandhi, is about 10 percentage points ahead of Erdogan. The forthcoming elections are expected to decide the future course of Turkey’s economy, which is in bad shape due to Erdogan’s unorthodox policy of low-interest rates that caused inflation to run out of control and the value of the Turkish lira to plummet.
Furthermore, the elections will show if the executive presidency in Turkey will be dismantled, whether Erdogan is sincere in his recent efforts to mend relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, Egypt, and Greece, and, if the opposition wins, what direction Turkey’s foreign policy will take.
According to the final list of candidates for the post of Turkish President, Kilicdaroglu will not be the only candidate to challenge Erdogan. The other challengers are as follows: Muharrem Ince, who split from the Republican Party (CHP) in 2021, and Sinan Organ, who is a former member of MHP but now represents five small nationalist parties.
It is noteworthy that Ince was the CHP candidate in the last election in 2018 because at that time the party thought that he had a better chance than mild-mannered Kilicdaroglu to beat Erdogan. In those elections, Ince got 30.6 percent of the vote.
His candidature is expected to harm Kilicdaroglu, as he may get thousands of votes that would have otherwise gone to Kilicdaroglu, making it extremely difficult for “Turkey’s Gandhi” to secure 50 percent of the votes cast, the percentage that is necessary for a candidate to be elected president from the first round.
