The alliance against President Erdogan in Turkey almost broke up over the candidate issue. Now opposition leader Kilicdaroglu is to challenge the incumbent. The Turkish pre-election thriller is over.
An alliance of six Turkish opposition parties has agreed on a common candidate for the presidential elections in May. The alliance is sending the leader of the largest opposition party, CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, into a race against incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the leader of the Saadet party, Temel Karamollaoglu, announced in Ankara.
“Kemal Kilicdaroglu is our presidential candidate,” announced Karamollaoglu in the presence of the leaders of the five other parties, including Kilicdaroglu. “We would have been eliminated if we split,” 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu told cheering supporters in Ankara after the announcement. He promised to lead the country “on the basis of consultations and compromises” in the event of an election victory against Erdogan. “Law and justice will prevail,” he added.
The alliance had not been able to agree on a common candidate for a long time; in the past few days there had even been indications of a collapse of the alliance. Five parties wanted to send Kilicdaroglu into the race against Erdogan. The leader of the nationalist Iyi party, Meral Aksener, on the other hand, favored the mayors of the metropolises of Istanbul and Ankara, Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, who also belong to the social-democratic CHP.
The two mayors declared at the weekend that they support their party leader’s candidacy. Imamoglu and Yavas then met with Aksener on Monday to persuade her to continue supporting the coalition of six opposition parties. The presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey are scheduled for May 14 – a good three months after the devastating earthquake in the Turkish-Syrian border area that killed more than 45,000 in Turkey alone. Erdogan is seeking another term. The opposition accuses him, among other things, of not having adequately prepared the country for earthquakes.
A breakup of the opposition alliance would have played into Erdogan’s hands. Even before the earthquake catastrophe, the President, who has been in charge of the country for 20 years, had to deal with a number of crises at the same time. His economic policy set in motion an inflationary spiral that caused prices to rise by 85 percent last year. In addition, his government is fighting allegations of nepotism and corruption. Polls point to a tight election outcome.
