On May 14, Turkish voters are called to vote for both the presidential and legislative elections. Manual.
Four candidates are running in the first round. If neither of them obtains 50% of the votes in the first round, a second round will decide between the best two on May 28.
– Muharrem Ince, 59-year-old schoolteacher and former presidential candidate in 2018 – he won 30% of the vote and came second. He then left the CHP (Republican People’s Party) to found his own dissident movement, the Homeland Party (Memleket partisi).
– Sinan Ogan, 55, former deputy of the far-right MHP (Nationalist Action Party), from which he was expelled in 2015. Close to Azerbaijan, he leads a coalition of five ultranationalist, pan-Turkist and anti-migrant groups , dubbed Alliance of the Ancestors.
These two small candidates will, in all likelihood, remain below 5% and have no chance of joining the second round. In order to appear in the first round, they struggled to collect the necessary 100,000 signatures, well helped by supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For the latter, it is a way of weakening his main opponent, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
– Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 74, former social security official. He has chaired the CHP (Republican People’s Party, Kemalist) since 2010, heir to Atatürk’s single party, but he has never been a presidential candidate, leaving second knives to present themselves in 2014 and 2018. At the head from a long-timid opposition to the excesses of the regime, he gained confidence after 2017, when he led a “march for justice” between Ankara and Istanbul. The 2019 municipal elections also see his party win all major Turkish cities. Kiliçdaroglu is at the head of the Alliance of the Nation, also known as the Table of Six, a heterogeneous coalition which brings together social democrats, nationalists and Islamists. Notably, he garnered the implicit support of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, which chose not to present a candidate.
– Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 69, founder and president of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), installed at the top of power since March 2003. He has won all the elections he has run since: legislative in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2018, presidential in 2014 and 2018… As for the last election, he tied up with several far-right parties, including the Gray Wolves of the MHP (Nationalist Action Party), the Republic Alliance.
Two major coalitions share most of the political landscape. These alliances are not made on ideological bases since each brings together Islamist and conservative formations as well as nationalist parties from the Gray Wolves.
– The Alliance of the Nation, or Table of Six:
the CHP (Republican People’s Party), Kemalist, heir to Atatürk;
the nationalist IYI (Good Party) split off from the MHP;
the DP (Democratic Party), centre-right;
the Islamist Saadet Partisi (Happiness Party), from which the AKP broke away in 2001;
the Islamist Gelecek Party (Party of the Future), founded in 2019 by former Erdogan Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, an AKP dissident;
the Deva Partisi (Party of Progress and Democracy), Islamist, founded in 2019 by Ali Babacan, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Economy of Erdogan.
– The Alliance of the Republic, formed around Erdogan, represents the following parties:
the Islamist and nationalist AKP (Justice and Development Party);
the ultra-nationalist MHP (Nationalist Action Party), a neo-fascist and militarist party, the base of the famous Gray Wolves;
the BBP (Big Union Party), ultranationalist, religious split of the MHP;
This coalition was joined by the Hüda-Par, a fundamentalist and Kurdish party whose members were linked to dozens of political crimes in the 1990s-2000s.
The pro-Kurdish left party, the HDP (People’s Democracy Party), Turkey’s third political force and credited with 10 to 13% in the polls, has given up running under this label, for fear of a just dissolution. before the elections. Its candidates will run under the banner of the YSP (Left Green Party). Their results could determine which side the majority leans on.
