The boil has been lanced. The debate over the Alevi faith of Turkey’s main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and what it means for his electoral fortunes in a potential face-off with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally spilled out into the public when Ahmet Sik, a left-wing lawmaker and former journalist, made his opinions known.

Sik articulated what many privately thought but dared not say: that Kilicdaroglu’s Alevi roots are a hindrance. Sik was forced to apologize and clarify his remarks after facing sharp criticism for providing fodder to Erdogan, who has played the Alevi card against Kilicdaroglu in the past.

In fact, he might have done Turkey’s opposition a favor. With proper framing, Kilicdaroglu’s faith could even become a trump card and an opportunity for the opposition to project inclusiveness and for voters to cast aside prejudices and unite against Erdogan. It could be Turkey’s Obama moment or its Zelenskyy one when Ukraine, a country stained by antisemitism, elected its first Jewish president in 2019. Some would argue that comparisons with majority Christian countries don’t apply. But then Pakistan, which broke away from Hindu majority India in 1947 as a haven for Sunni Muslims, was founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Shiite.

Pollsters would call such thinking fanciful. Surveys consistently show that the leader of the pro-secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) would fare poorly against Erdogan. The same polls say CHP mayors of Ankara and Istanbul and Meral Aksener, the leader of the right-wing nationalist Iyi Party, would all beat Erdogan in a runoff.