Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on May 11 that he has not yet made up his mind to run for president in the first public election for the post. He said, however, that if he gets elected three months from now he won’t be a passive president performing only ceremonial duties. He argued that the opposition has no chance to defeat his party’s candidate at the ballot box.
“The opposition is now talking about coming up with a joint candidate. They, however, fail to understand that the people once again threw their support behind us with the March 30 local elections,” Erdogan said, addressing the Justice and Development Party (AKP) annual gathering on Sunday in Afyonkarahisar. According to Erdogan, the country’s two leading opposition parties — the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) — have no chance to convince their bases in favor of a joint candidate and to win the Kurdish vote all at the same time.
Adil Gur, head of A&G Research, a polling company, agrees: “It’s not only how difficult it is for these opposition parties to agree over a joint candidate, but no one should also underestimate the triumph of the prime minister in this March 30 local election,” he told Al-Monitor, noting that Erdogan won despite being under a judicial review of corruption and bribery since December that ensnared his government. “Still, though, his constituency extended an exceptional loyalty to him in a time of crisis and he came out even stronger as a leader from this election.”
The Supreme Election Board (YSK) provided the official results of the local election as follows: The AKP received 42.8% of the vote while the CHP gathered 26.3%, the MHP 17.8% and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and People’s Democratic Party (HDP) a combined total of 6.1%. Technically speaking, as Gur pointed out, the sum of the CHP and MHP vote equals 44.1%, more than the AKP vote for the first time, and that difference becomes even wider when the Kurdish votes are included, bringing it to 50.2%.
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