Last week of the presidential campaign in Turkey, after the first round on May 14, from which no candidate emerged victorious. A second round is therefore scheduled for Sunday, May 28. Outgoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the favorite with 49.5% collected in the first round. But his rival Kemal Kiliçdaroglu still hopes to beat him after having convinced 45% of the votes. While the power camp seems confident in its victory, the opposition is mobilizing at all costs.
From our correspondent in Istanbul,
In a campaign between-two-turns, no political activity is trivial. Even when the mayor of Istanbul visits a café-bookstore: Ekrem Imamoglu, who will become vice-president if the opposition candidate Kemal Kiliçdaroglu wins, comes to meet young people conveniently seated around the café tables. Youth are a key constituency for the Turkish opposition and selfies with the mayor are good publicity on social media.
Ekrem Imamoglu refuses to answer journalists’ questions. Next to him, the district mayor Riza Akpolat, elected from the same party, is less stingy with comments. And for good reason: in the first round, his district of Besiktas voted 80% for Kemal Kilicdaroglu. But it’s still not enough
” We are redirecting our efforts to voters who did not turn out to vote, those whom we did not speak to enough and those who complain about ussummarizes Riza Akpolat. We try to convince them in the short time we have left. »
Even if he manages to retain his voters from the first round, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu needs around three million additional votes to win the second round. The opposition hopes to mobilize one to two million of the more than eight million Turks who did not vote on May 14.
The nationalist card to seduce Sinan Ogan voters
She also thinks she can count on some of the voters of Sinan Ogan, an ultranationalist who came third in the first round, with 2.8 million votes.
Ahmet Kiraz, local representative of the CHP, the party of Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, believes that if they choose, Sinan Ogan voters will prefer the opposition: ” They are nationalists reluctant to vote in the first round for [Kemal] Kiliçdaroglu for many reasons: because he is on the left, because it is the CHP… We think that this electorate will essentially vote for Kiliçdaroglu anyway, because it is above all an electorate that refuses to vote [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan because he negotiated with the PKK [Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan – NDLR]reached agreements. »
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu plays the nationalist card to the hilt that he had very little agitated before the first lap. His camp recalls every day that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has negotiated with the PKK in the past and he promises to send Syrian refugees home. All this is not to displease the main ally of Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the ultranationalist Iyi party, or “Good party”. Egemen Güner, one of his local officials, assures that a victory is possible:
There is no reason to lose morale. No one has won or lost the election yet. As we were focused on a victory in the first round, some of us may have been disappointed. But note that so far, all the elections in Turkey had ended in a single round with a victory for Mr. Erdogan. There we have a second round, the match resumes with a score of 0 to 0, and we believe that we can make up for the 5 points that we lack to win Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
Egemen Güner, one of Iyi’s local officials, assures victory is possible
The confident Erdogan camp
In Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s camp, we are just as confident. All the more confident that the outgoing president came close to victory in the first round with 49.5%. Arif, an activist of the AKP, the party of the head of state, thinks that Tayyip Erdogan does not have much effort to make to win next Sunday.
Besides, he remarks, he doesn’t really campaign: ” We didn’t expect such a result in the first lap… We didn’t think we would have such a lead. We even went to vote worried, thinking we could lose. But the results of the first round show that Erdogan still has real support in society. For the second round, it’s clear: he is the favorite, we are not at all afraid that he will lose, we are even sure that he will win. »
Arif wants to believe that the electorate of Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be all the more mobilized on Sunday as the Turkish leader claims that this mandate will be his last.
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