Turkey awaits run-off election with great anticipation

28 May is the expected date for the second round of the presidential and parliamentary elections held on Sunday, as the first round did not produce a definitive winner for the presidential post. 

Turnout was high, at around 90% of those eligible to vote, a sign of the great importance of these elections and of the political polarisation that exists in Turkey, which pits those loyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Justice and Development Party, against the opposition, which is represented by a single figure, that of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People's Party..

In recent years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been deploying a political discourse with nationalist, conservative and Islamist overtones, impregnated with an interventionist foreign policy that has led Turkey to take an active part in the civil wars in Syria and Libya and to set itself up as an important negotiator for an important issue linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that of the Ukrainian grain trade, which has been able to leave port in ships thanks in part to Turkish mediation between Ukraine and Russia. 

Expectations are high because the stakes are high, no more and no less than whether or not Recep Tayyip Erdogan will remain in power after years of leading the Eurasian country as head of state and government. It is not for nothing that Erdogan has been the Turkish president since 2014. 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accused by the opposition of excessive authoritarianism and of persecuting many opponents in various areas such as politics and the judiciary. In recent years there have been numerous arrests and trials of opposition elements on various charges, always in the shadow of the great power wielded by the Ottoman strongman. Not to mention the suffocating persecution of the Kurdish minority, accused by the Turkish government of carrying out terrorist acts in the south of the country. Indeed, one of the Turkish pretexts for entering across the Syrian border and positioning itself in the Syrian civil war was to persecute the Kurdish-Syrian elements present in the border area. 

Against this backdrop, the opposition reacted after so many years. It denounced the political harassment it had suffered, mainly from the Republican People's Party led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu and the pro-Kurdish, left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party. There was also strong criticism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's economic management, due to the sharp depreciation of the Turkish lira and Turkey's pressured inflation. Inflation peaked in October 2022 at 85.5 per cent year-on-year, while in March 2023 it reached 50.5 per cent, a very high rate of price increases for a country like Turkey. In fact, Kemal Kilicdaroglu managed for the first time to bring together Erdogan's opponents in a joint coalition to confront the president, who is the strong favourite to revalidate his post and has been singled out for the political and economic drift suffered by the Eurasian nation. 

Polls even predicted a victory for Erdogan in the first round, but everything was more even. Erdogan won 49.5% of the vote and Kilicdaroglu 44.9%. The current president came close to reaching the 50% that would have seen him revalidate his post for the third time, but fell just short. 

It now remains to be seen how the vote will be redistributed, which seems to remain the same in relation to those who voted for one or the other candidate in the first round given the existing polarisation; but it remains to be seen how the 5% that the third place finisher in the previous round, Sinan Ogan, will be distributed. It remains to be seen what will happen to those who voted for Ogan's party, who will now have to decide between Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu, and that could turn the election around. Although everyone expects Sinan Ogan to campaign for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and ask his voters to elect the current president as they are on the same conservative wavelength, in fact, Ogan is seen as a far-right candidate by various analysts and therefore the closest to his political spectrum is the Justice and Development Party. Sinan Ogan's nearly three million votes may determine whether Erdogan extends his already long rule or whether there is a change in Turkish politics.

This is the first time a run-off election has been held in Turkey since Recep Tayyip Erdogan converted Turkey's parliamentary constitutionalist system into a fully presidential one in 2017. Until now Erdogan had always won more than 50% of the vote and the first round had been enough to inaugurate him as the nation's president, but political polarisation and the economic crisis have mobilised the entire opposition to confront the so-called "sultan" and the current president is closer than ever to being ousted from his omnipotent power, even though all forecasts expect a final victory for Recep Tayyip Erdogan.