It didn’t take long for Turkey’s perennially squabbling political opposition to revert to type. The battle for the leadership of the pro-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is already shaping up with the current incumbent lobbing mortars at the party’s presidential contender, Muharrem Ince, for his performance in Sunday’s polls. With a straight face, Kemal Kilicdaroglu told a news conference today that with 30.6%, Ince had scored “below expectations,” never mind that the CHP had fared far worse in the parliamentary race with only 22.6%. That was almost 3 percentage points down from the CHP's 25% in the last parliamentary elections in November 2015.
Calls for Kilicdaroglu to resign are mounting over the loss, with rebels pushing for a party congress to elect a new leader. Ince, whose electrifying campaign performance drew support well beyond the CHP’s traditional base, including ethnic Kurds, said he would visit all 81 of Turkey’s provinces to “thank” the people. More likely he will be lobbying the CHP’s grass-roots organizations to help him mount a challenge to Kilicdaroglu. He needs more than half of the delegates’ signatures to force a contest.
An apparently unfazed Kilicdaroglu maintained his party had done well given the undemocratic nature of Sunday’s polls, which were held under stifling emergency rule, dubious electoral laws and covered by a media that is near fully controlled by pro-government corporations. The “only loser” of the election, he declared, was President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which drew 42.5% — seven points less than in 2015 — thereby narrowly losing its majority in the 600-member parliament.
Erdogan scored a full 10 percentage points more than his own party, with nationalist voters helping him clinch victory in a first round of balloting in keeping with the formal pre-electoral alliance struck between Erdogan and far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli. The MHP, which was written off by many pundits, maintained its 2015 standing, pulling in 11.6% even though Bahceli barely hit the stump and his former protege and now would-be nemesis Meral Aksener broke away to form her own Iyi (Good) Party. These factors ought to have eaten into the MHP’s votes, but instead, Iyi clinched 10%, effectively doubling the nationalist vote.
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