Turkey’s opposition leaders ended months of debate on Monday and consented to name the head of the main secular party as their mutual candidate against the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May 14 elections.
A last-ditch deal aimed at averting further clash of the opposition vote would see CHP chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu name the five opposition leaders as vice presidents should he conclude Erdogan’s two-decade regime.
“We would have been finished had we split up,” Kilicdaroglu told huge crowds of cheering supporters after coming from hours of tense talks.
Erdogan faces the toughest fight of his political career in what many view as Turkey’s most consequential elections since its arrival as a post-Ottoman republic around a 100-year ago.
The 68-year-old leader must overcome the two-folded hurdles of an economic plight and relief and recovery from the devastating earthquake as he seeks to expand his Islamic style of rule until 2028.
Opinion polls suggest a tight race that could end-up far too close to call.
But Erdogan’s task had appeared to become one again easier when one of the main leaders of the six-party opposition alliance left from the talks on Friday.
Meral Aksener has suggested that Kilicdaroglu — a soft-spoken leftist leader from Turkey’s extended-marginalised Alevi community — lacked the popular appeal to defeat Erdogan in the next presidential polls.
She has rather urged the popular CHP mayors of either Istanbul or Ankara to come and step into the election.
The two met Aksener on Monday in a bid to bring her nationalist Iyi Party back into the opposition group.
“Our nation cannot afford a split,” Ankara mayor Mansur Yavas told media after the meeting.
Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu said saving the alliance was “particlarly important in the difficult times that Turkey is going through after the earthquake had happened”.
– Economic hopes –
The opposition was also last united in a bid to unseat Erdogan’s allies in municipal elections conducted in 2019.
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Their ability to regain possession of Turkey’s two main cities could shatter Erdogan’s aura of invincibility and set the stage for the probable return to power by the alliance of the secular state’s revered founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
But Kilicdaroglu suggested that both Yavas and Imamoglu should keep on as mayors to avoid the warning of handing back possesion of both cities to Erdogan’s Islamic-dominated party.
A separate text consented by the six leaders left the option of promoting the two mayors to vice presidents once a transition to a new system of power concludes.
Analysts viewed the opposition’s unsuccessful attept to put aside their points of views just two months earlier to the vote as one of the key factors working in Erdogan’s favour.
Erdogan’s popular approval plunged after he started an unusual economic experiment in late 2021 that tried to kill inflation by hugely cutting mark up rates.
A resulting currency crisis washed away people’s savings and pushed the annual inflation rate to a huge 85 percent.
Turkish stocks and eurobonds both rallied on increasing investor expectations that the joint candidate will be able to beat Erdogan and restore economic orthodoxy after many years of shaking.
Kilicdaroglu has vowed to reinstate the central bank’s full independence — and freedom to raise mark up rates — should he win.
