He called his opponent Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, the opposition coalition candidate for the May 14 presidential election, an alcoholic and drunk. He called him a terrorist, an LGBT, an unbeliever too, and other bird names. Its interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, asserted in a threatening tone that the West could turn the election into a coup. And the Minister of Justice, Bekir Bozdag, announced that this Sunday evening, voting day, there will be “those who will pop the champagne and party until dawn, or those who lay their pure foreheads on the ground in prostration, praising the Lord”.
The outgoing Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his men have rarely gone out of their way to qualify their opponents or critics. For the past ten years, the speeches interspersed with poetic, flowery and rather well put together quotes from the one who was once called for his eloquence the “nightingale of the Koran” have largely given way to injunction and invective. , with authoritarian drifts too, matched by his irascible and filthy trait. But rarely to such a degree.
Perhaps this should be seen as verbatim confirmation of the extreme importance of these elections. A double trigger election, presidential but also legislative, which would place the Turkish Republic, just a hundred years old this year, at a crossroads. Didn’t former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and Erdogan’s unsuccessful candidate for Istanbul mayor in 2019 himself say that “this election was unlike any past election” ?
A noticeably degraded image
In the event of a new electoral blank check, the outgoing head of state could, according to many critics and observers, make the country slide definitively towards an even more authoritarian regime, even downright dictatorial. Conversely, a victory for the opposition would not necessarily mean that Turkey would take a new direction. Kiliçdaroglu announced that he wanted to restore democracy and the rule of law.
But we do not know if Erdogan would accept defeat or if, as in the municipal elections in Istanbul, he would push for new elections in the event of too close results, or if he would unleash his supporters against his successor, like a Donald Trump in 2021. He himself said again, no later than Monday, during a meeting in Ankara, quoting his opponent by name: “My nation will not cede power to someone who was elected president with the help of the PKK [Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan, en guerre contre l’Etat turc]. »
You have 75.43% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.