After a three-day break due to illness, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his first public appearance. He spoke on domestically developed defense technology at the Teknofest technology festival in Istanbul on Saturday. There he also announced the candidate for Turkey’s deployment on the International Space Station (ISS).
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbaiba attended the meeting. In the elections in around two weeks, Erdoğan, as a representative of the Islamic conservative party AKP, has to fear his re-election after 20 years in power. Polls put his strongest challenger, opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, at least on par. He is the joint candidate for an alliance of six parties from different camps and is also supported by the pro-Kurdish HDP. On Friday, Kılıçdaroğlu announced that if he won the election, he would set up a space research center at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.
Erdoğan had to temporarily withdraw from the hot phase of the election campaign on Tuesday after the 69-year-old had to interrupt a TV interview because of stomach problems. Until then, he had completed around three public appointments a day. His team rejected speculation about a possible heart attack. This Saturday, Erdogan is also expected at an election campaign event in the secular stronghold of Izmir – one day before Kilicdaroglu’s appearance in the Aegean metropolis.
Also on Saturday, the CHP – the leading party in the opposition bloc around Kılıçdaroğlu – announced that it would hire up to half a million people as election observers. There are “serious concerns” about the security of the elections, the CHP politician in charge of the arrangements, Oğuz Kaan Salıcı, told reporters in Istanbul. In view of the fact that a large part of the Turkish media is directly or indirectly under Erdoğan’s control and that there is therefore no real freedom of information, foreign observers have also expressed their concerns about the fairness of the elections.