One of the most important figures in Turkey’s presidential election ballot could be Sinan Ogan, a nationalist politician who finished third in Sunday’s first round of elections: he won just over 5 percent of the vote, but since the two main candidates are very close it is possible that Ogan will have a decisive role in the coming weeks.
In the first round, outgoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan obtained about 49 percent of the vote, while his main opponent, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 45 percent. Since neither of them has reached 50, for the first time since Turkey has been a presidential republic there will be a runoff: it will be in two weeks, on May 28th. Third-placed Sinan Ogan, whose good election result was quite surprising, said he will let it be known very soon which of the two candidates he will support.
Ogan is a right-wing politician and very nationalist. He belongs to the secular right and has very strict positions on immigration and refugee reception (especially the millions of Syrians who still live in Turkey after fleeing the country’s civil war), against Kurdish minorities and on maintaining traditional and conservative Turkish values .
Its electoral cartel, which is called the Ancestral Alliance (ATA Alliance), is made up of five very small nationalist parties which in the parliamentary elections (which were held at the same time as the presidential ones) won just one deputy. Ogan himself obtained a result that in absolute terms is rather limited: just 5 percent of the vote. but this 5 percent is still considerable, given the polarization of Turkish politics, and could be enough to make Ogan’s voters decisive.
Due to ideological affinities, Ogan should be closer to Erdogan, who despite being an Islamic leader is a conservative and a nationalist, rather than to Kilicdaroglu, a moderately centre-left leader. In reality, things are more complicated, because Ogan’s political career was marked by the decision to reject an alliance of his old party, the MHP, with Erdogan’s AKP party.
For much of his political career, Ogan was a top leader of MHP, the Turkish nationalist and secular right-wing party, led by the elder Devlet Bahceli, one of the historic figures of the right in Turkey. In 2015 Ogan was the deputy secretary of the party and the MHP was a political force firmly in opposition against Erdogan, who was indeed a conservative leader but also an Islamist leader, contrary to the secular values proposed by the MHP. But after the June 2015 elections things changed.
In those elections, for the first time the AKP, Erdogan’s party, did not obtain an absolute majority and stopped at 40 percent of the votes. The oppositions, which were made up of the CHP (the party of Kilicdaroglu), the MHP (the party of Bahceli and Ogan) and the HDP (the main party of the Kurdish minority), would have been able to form an alliance for the first time oust Erdogan from power. However, the negotiations failed because the MHP and HDP, two historically opposing parties, could not reach an agreement. The elections were repeated in November 2015, and this time Erdogan’s AKP managed to win a large majority in the parliament.
The MHP, on the other hand, suffered a serious defeat and lost 40 deputies between the June and November elections. Bahceli, the leader of the party, decided at that point to abandon the opposition camp and to ally with Erdogan. This decision caused a huge internal revolt among party leaders, including Ogan and Meral Aksener, another prominent nationalist leader: all were against forming an alliance with Erdogan.
The rioters forced an extraordinary congress, which they however lost. Bahceli remained leader of the MHP, and the rioters were expelled or forced to leave. Ogan tried to stay inside the party, suing his leadership, but after a few months he was expelled anyway and lost his parliamentary seat.
Since then, the Turkish nationalist movement has split into several parts: a substantial majority has remained in the MHP, which over the years has become a very loyal ally of Erdogan. Meral Aksener founded his own nationalist party, the IYI party, which participated in the opposition alliance against Erdogan and supported Kilicdaroglu in Sunday’s elections.
Ogan has been relatively less visible in recent years, until he was nominated for president by the Ancestral Alliance in March. During the electoral campaign, Ogan maintained a position equidistant from both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu, but according to initial analyses, his voters are mainly AKP voters who are dissatisfied with Erdogan’s administration.
It is not yet clear whether Ogan will back either candidate. It’s not even clear in reality whether Ogan really controls the 2.7 million people who voted for him, or if, as some analysts believe, the vote in favor of him was mainly a protest vote, therefore rather volatile.
In the days leading up to the elections, however, Ogan had imposed some conditions, the most important of which was the elimination of all pro-Kurdish parties from Turkish political life. This would complicate an alliance with Kilicdaroglu, who is unofficially supported by the Kurdish HDP party. On the other hand, Ogan defined his career on refusing an alliance with Erdogan, and this too could weigh.
