Kemal Kilicdaroglu will represent six opposition parties in the May 14 elections.
By Le Figaro with AFP
Published 06/03/2023 at 19:07, updated 06/03/2023 at 19:57
The coalition of six Turkish opposition parties on Monday appointed Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the leader of its main formation, to face President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in power for 20 years, in the May 14 presidential election.
“Kemal Kiliçdaroglu is our presidential candidate,” Fortune Party leader Temel Karamollaoglu told a crowd gathered outside his party’s headquarters in Ankara, where leaders of the six parties met on Monday. The leaders of the other five parties in the alliance, including Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, were with him at the time of the announcement. The presidential and parliamentary elections were held on schedule despite the February 6 earthquake that killed more than 46,000 people and devastated entire areas in the south and south-east of the country.
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The nation’s alliance saved in extremis
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, who has headed the Republican People’s Party (CHP, Social Democrats) since 2010, has promised a return to the democratic game if elected in May. “We will all establish the power of morality and justice together,” Kemal Kiliçdaroglu said after the announcement. “We as Nation Alliance will lead Turkey based on consultation and compromise,” he added. “Law and justice prevail.” Dubbed the “alliance of the nation,” the coalition failed to implode on Friday, just ten weeks before the election.
The leader of the Good Party (nationalist), the second most important party in the coalition, had vehemently opposed Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s candidacy and called on the popular CHP mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, to stand in his place ask – which they refused. After meeting the two mayors and then Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on Monday in Ankara, Good Party leader Meral Aksener finally resumed her seat at the Alliance table.
Back to the democratic game
For some of the opposition supporters, Mr Kiliçdaroglu, a 74-year-old former senior Alevi minority official, suffers from a lack of charisma towards the outgoing head of state, the candidate to succeed him. But President Erdogan, whose popularity has suffered from the economic crisis Turkey continues to experience, will have to answer to voters for the slow relief seen in the hours after the February 6 earthquake. Flaws that Kemal Kiliçdaroglu did not fail to denounce, denouncing “incompetence” and corruption at the top of the country. The 69-year-old Turkish President, while apologizing for the delay in the arrival of aid, has made rebuilding the devastated areas his guideline, promising to build nearly 490,000 earthquake-proof housing units “within a year”.
Ten weeks to win
According to polls, the May 14 presidential election promises to be his most dangerous election since 2003, the year he came to power as prime minister. President Erdogan and his party, the AKP (Islamic Conservative), already saw the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara get away in favor of the CHP in 2019, a major setback. And according to the Turkish media, the left-wing pro-Kurdish party HDP, which takes a positive view of the appointment of Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, is unlikely to field a candidate this year to favor the opposition alliance.
The HDP, the third party in parliament, won 12% of the vote in the last general election, and its imprisoned candidate received 8.4% of the vote in the 2018 presidential election Line with which the HDP is incompatible. The opposition now has less than ten weeks to push their program and campaign across the country. However, the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, which devastated 11 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, poses significant logistical problems, with 3.3 million people forced to flee the affected areas.
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SEE ALSO – Turkey: The opposition alliance implodes ten weeks before the presidential election