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Nicosia [Cyprus]April 3 (ANI): Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing his biggest test in two years in power, although he remains a formidable candidate.
Opinion polls suggest Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and its nationalist ally the MHP will get 45 percent of the vote in the parliamentary election, almost the same as the six-party opposition bloc. However, Kemal Kildaroglu, the opposition coalition candidate known as Turkey’s Gandhi, leads Erdogan by about 10 percentage points in the concurrent presidential election on May 14.
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The upcoming election is expected to determine the future direction of Turkey’s economy, which is struggling due to runaway inflation and a plunge in the value of the Turkish lira due to Erdogan’s unorthodox low interest rate policy.
In addition, the election will show whether Turkey’s executive presidency will be abolished, and whether Erdogan’s recent efforts to repair relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Greece are sincere, if the opposition wins, Where is Turkey’s foreign policy headed.
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According to the shortlist of candidates for the Turkish presidency, Kilicdaroglu will not be the only candidate to challenge Erdogan. The other challengers are as follows: Muharrem Ince, who split from the Republican Party (CHP) in 2021, and Sinan Organ, which was once a member of the MHP but now represents five small nationalist parties.
Notably, Ince was the CHP candidate in the last election in 2018, when the party thought he had a better chance of defeating Erdogan than the mild-mannered Kilicdaroglu. In those elections, Ince received 30.6 percent of the vote.
His candidacy is expected to hurt Kilicdaroglu, as he could get thousands of votes that would otherwise go to Kilicdaroglu, making it extremely difficult for “Turkey’s Gandhi” to get 50% of the vote, the required percentage for a candidate to be elected President from the first round.
Whether it is the Awami League ruling bloc of Erdogan’s AKP and Devlet Bahceli’s MHP, or the National Alliance, the six-party main opposition led by Kemal Kildaroglu, according to multiple polls released. Coalition – Neither is expected to have a clear victory. So much will depend on how voters in the pro-Kurdish HDP (Turkey’s third-largest party) will vote in the upcoming elections.
Jailed former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas made it clear that “Erdogan is a black page that is absolutely closed to the Kurds.”
Notably, the HDP, which represents Turkey’s 15 million Kurdish minority, is facing a closed case in the Constitutional Court due to its alleged ties to the outlawed PKK and will be outlawed if convicted.
The HDP has repeatedly criticized Erdogan’s one-man rule, but has so far refrained from publicly declaring its support for Kilicdaroglu. However, the fact that pro-Kurdish parties have decided not to nominate their own presidential candidate will certainly benefit Kilicdaroglu, who, unlike the other candidates, has never been hostile to the Kurds.
Commenting on the announcement that the HDP would not field its own presidential candidate, Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the opposition “has never been this close to winning in the first round of voting” on May 14. ”
A key question about the Turkish election is whether it will be free and fair, given that Erdogan’s rule has been largely undemocratic and that he has generated enormous power and controlled many aspects of Turkish life. He purged more than 100,000 civil servants from state institutions, took control of much of the country’s media outlets, jailed journalists and ordinary people who expressed opinions he disliked, and suppressed parliamentary democracy.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest regional security organization working to achieve stability, peace and democracy for more than a billion people, has refused to recognize the free and fairness of Turkish elections since 2015.
Using the judiciary under his control, Erdogan managed to prevent the election of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, widely regarded as the most powerful Opposition candidate.
In December, a Turkish court sentenced the dynamic Imamoglu to two years and seven months in prison for his statement two years earlier that “those who canceled the Istanbul mayoral election are fools”. The court ruled he had insulted the High Electoral Commission, which had controversially issued a decision to cancel the first election. (Imamoglu won that election and the re-election on June 23, 2019).
If upheld on appeal, the court also bars him from holding elected political office and other activities while serving his sentence.
With the energetic and fiery Imamoglu gone, Erdogan thought he could easily win over the suave Kemal Kilicdaroglu, but the devastating February 6 earthquake killed more than 50,000 people, destroyed some 650,000 homes and left millions The homelessness of people, coupled with Erdogan’s reluctance to mobilize the military for relief efforts, has eroded a large part of popular support for Erdogan and his ruling AK Party.
President Erdogan’s promise to rebuild the country and his stated goal of “handing over 319,000 residential and village houses to owners within a year to restore cities in earthquake zones” seem unrealistic.
No one is sure about the outcome of the Turkish elections. Much also depends on whether Erdogan will take advantage of the state of emergency declared in the ten provinces affected by the quake and whether he will allow free and fair elections. (Arnie)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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