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.
