For the opposition to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the first round of elections, held on May 14, was a huge disappointment. Polls, opposition representatives and a good portion of voters were convinced that Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of almost all opposition parties, would be ahead at the end of the count: some even thought that Kilicdaroglu would win in the first round, ending more than two decades of Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule. All hopes were dashed on election night: Erdogan got 49.5 percent of the vote and Kilicdaroglu 44.9. In Sunday’s run-off, it will be enough for Erdogan to improve the result of the first round by half a point to obtain a new mandate as president.
In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, where opposition to Erdogan has been very strong for years, many supporters of Kilicdaroglu had already prepared to celebrate the night of the first round: whether Kilicdaroglu won immediately, getting more than 50 per cent of the vote, whether or not he was ahead of the run-off, it would still have been a victory for the opposition. Some opposition supporters said they prepared bottles of wine on election night to uncork when it was announced that their candidate had the lead. Others were ready to take to the streets to celebrate.
Instead, at the end of a very long night, Erdogan finished first, and with a rather large gap over Kilicdaroglu, almost impossible to fill in the runoff.
A manifesto in favor of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Istanbul (Valentina Lovato/Ruetir)
“In a ballot you start from scratch, you don’t necessarily have to consider the votes received in the first round,” says Bilge Yabanci, a political science researcher who works between the United States and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Lei yabanci arrived in Istanbul from Italy, where she has lived for about three years, to be an observer at the city’s polling stations during Sunday’s run-off on behalf of an association that monitors the progress of the vote. Almost all political analysts, however, believe that a victory for Kilicdaroglu in the runoff is practically impossible: the Financial Times has defined the situation of the opposition as “desperate”.
The performance of the election night in the first round, on 14 May, contributed to this rather pessimistic mood. At the beginning of the counts Erdogan immediately had a strong advantage: this was expected, because in Turkey the first results to be announced are always those of areas of the country that vote by majority for the AKP, the president’s party, while the large cities and areas in the south-east, closest to the opposition, are counted later. The opposition therefore spent the night expecting a comeback from Kilicdaroglu. Himself, about halfway through the counting, he wrote on Twitter: “We are ahead”, fueling a hope that never came true.
Opposition supporters stayed up most of the night, until two or three in the morning, expecting Kilicdaroglu to overtake Erdogan, but it never came. Indeed, Erdogan maintained a considerable advantage, and came within a few tenths of winning the elections in the first round.
Until May 14, what is called momentum in American politics, that is the psychological advantage given by the idea that things are moving in one’s favour, was decidedly on the side of the opposition. After a disappointing night in the first round, momentum is all on Erdogan’s side.
To justify this situation, the political scientist Bilge Yabanci speaks of an “Erdogan effect”, i.e. the exceptional ability of the Turkish president to continue to obtain consensus among an enormous part of the population, especially the poorest and least educated, despite the problems of the his government.
For the opposition, this May election seemed like the perfect opportunity. For the first time in Turkey’s history, virtually all parties opposed to Erdogan had come together in a single grand coalition representing six very different political forces: from the secular social democrats of the CHP (Kilicdaroglu’s party) to right-wing nationalists to moderate Islamists. Even the environmentalist and pro-Kurdish HDP party, while not joining the coalition, had avoided presenting its own candidate, thus giving its implicit support to Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan also seemed somewhat weakened by Turkey’s dire economic situation and mishandling of the earthquake that hit the country in February.
The fact that despite all this Erdogan still managed to be the candidate with the most votes in the first round caused disappointment and despair in the opposition and its supporters. To make matters worse, Erdogan’s AKP party won the majority of seats in the parliamentary elections, which were held concurrently with the presidential elections. Turkey has had a presidential political system since 2016, where the parliament no longer has the importance it once had, but its role is still central for whoever governs the country.
This situation became quite evident in the two weeks that separated the first round from the ballot. In his public outings, Erdogan has always seemed rather calm, while the main opposition figures avoided all interviews and contact with the media for long days after the first round.
A manifesto in favor of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Istanbul (Valentina Lovato/Ruetir)
Some speak as if Kilicdaroglu has already lost. Ali Bayramoglu, a well-known journalist and political commentator of a conservative orientation but opposed to Erdogan, says that «the opposition has too many internal weaknesses. On the one hand, the parties that make up the coalition against Erdogan are too different from each other, and in some cases antagonistic: some of the left, some of the right, some religious, some not, and promising the return of democracy was not enough”. Adds Bayramoglu: “The other weakness of the opposition was the candidate.”
Kilicdaroglu, an experienced politician with a soft-spoken and moderate attitude, is the only candidate who has been able to put together the multifaceted and complex opposition coalition against Erdogan. But his remarkable capacity for mediation and accommodation has not been accompanied, according to many, by the same political ability. “Kilicdaroglu was the only possible candidate, but he is not a strong candidate,” says Bayramoglu.
The Turkish aircraft carrier inaugurated in April 2023 moored in the Bosphorus channel (Valentina Lovato/Ruetir)
Two days before the ballot, opposition supporters continue to hope for what some of them define as a “surprise”, that is, despite all the difficulties, Kilicdaroglu will still manage to win the elections. Almost everyone, however, fears that Erdogan will win in the end.
