Turkey’s presidential contenders now have six days to convince voters, who gave none of them enough votes, to make a decision in the first round on May 14, with outgoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead after the Conservatives won legislative elections. organs. 49.52% of the vote, includes Erdogan (69), who is said to be tired of twenty years in power, with 2.5 million votes ahead of opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (Social Democrat), 74, a former official and veteran policy.
He promised a “return to spring”, a “calm democracy” and a return to the rule of law, but this did not convince the more than 44.9% of voters who voted with this broad right-to-left opposition coalition of nationalists.
After a strong mobilization on May 14 and an 89% turnout, Eurasia Consulting Group, one of the very few firms that predicted Erdogan’s lead in the first round, calculated that the outgoing president would win in the second round.
“Many nationalist voters did not agree with Kilicdaroglu’s choice to represent the opposition and did not support him,” said political scientist Berk Elsen of Istanbul’s Sabancı University.
The two candidates will compete fiercely for the votes of the 2.79 million voters cast for a third candidate, Sinan Ogan, who belongs to the far-right ultranationalists and wants, above all, to deport about five million refugees and immigrants living in the country.
And Ogan, 54, is waiting to announce who will vote “next week.”
Erdogan received him on Friday for an hour, but apart from a photo and a handshake with the “president”, nothing leaked from the meeting.
But Berk Essen believes Erdogan won’t necessarily need his votes, stressing that “he’s confident.”
On the other hand, Kılıçdaroğlu did not meet with Sinan Ogan, but at the same time he is negotiating with the leader of the nationalist Victory Party, Umit Ozdag.
