It is a symbol that Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose this Saturday. On the eve of the second round of the presidential election in Turkey, the head of state chose to bow on Saturday at the grave of his model in politics, a nationalist-Islamist hanged by the military.
Adnan Menderes, an emblematic figure for the Turkish conservative right, put an end in 1950 to the reign of the secular CHP of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey. He had made Islam a political tool, restoring the call to prayer in Arabic and reopening thousands of closed mosques. It is this political model that inspired Recep Tayyip Erdogan to create the Islamic-conservative AKP party, which accompanied his rise.
The outgoing president, 69, is the favorite despite twenty years in power against his opponent, the social democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 74. The outgoing president, worn out and weakened by the economic crisis and the earthquake of February 6, created a surprise by obtaining 49.5% of the vote on May 14, against 44.9% for his rival.
Since then, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, at the head of a coalition of six parties, from the nationalist right to the center left, has tried to mobilize his troops to the end, in particular on his right. His supporters have taken to the streets of major cities to call for votes and try to seduce young people and housewives, traditionally won over to Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
But unlike the outgoing president, omnipresent on the stands and on television, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu had to fight hard to be heard. According to the organization Reporters Without Borders, public television TRT granted “sixty times more airtime” to the incumbent president than to his rival during the campaign.
On the Turkish Fox television channel, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on Friday denounced the blocking of his campaign text messages by the telecommunications regulatory authority, accusing the president’s camp of “seeking by all means to stay in power”.
Simultaneously, the Head of State accused on TRT “the Western media of always trying to manufacture false news”. The arithmetic is nevertheless favorable to him after the rallying of the third man in the first round, Sinan Ogan, an ultranationalist who had won 5.2% of the vote.
Opposite, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, a trained economist and former senior civil servant, played the appeasement with an electorate stunned by inflation. The candidate, however, beefed up his speech between the two rounds, repeating in an unusually firm tone that he would return “within two years” the 3.4 million Syrians who had found refuge in Turkey.
The pro-Kurdish HDP party reiterated its unconditional support for him, despite Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s rapprochement with an ultranationalist and xenophobic micro-party.
Polling stations will be open Sunday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the first results are expected by early evening.