Polls conducted by at least two different agencies and published on Thursday showed Kemal Kilicdaroglu as the winner of the first round of Turkey’s presidential election, although none showed Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the lead as Turks are expected to vote on May 14 in an election that are considered one of the most important. in the modern history of Turkey, reports Reuters.

A poll conducted by Piar shows that Kemal Kilicdaroglu would win with 51.3%, while Erdogan would remain in second place with 45.3%. And the Alf agency gives the leader of the People’s Republican Party 51.2%

Polls since the devastating earthquakes on February 6 show Erdogan’s main rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu leading in the first round of voting. If no candidate receives more than half of the votes in the first round, a runoff between the top two candidates will be held on May 28.

Minor party candidate Muharrem Ince dropped out of the race on Thursday, potentially giving Kilicdaroglu a boost, but the move came after the latest polls were released.

The latest parliamentary election polls show the opposition alliance losing ground to the ruling People’s Alliance, led by Erdogan’s Islamist AKP.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu is wearing a steel vest before the presidential elections

A source in his Republican People’s Party said Kemal Kilicdaroglu wore a steel vest to a campaign rally on Friday, two days before Sunday’s presidential election, after receiving “information that he might be attacked”.

The footage also shows Kilicdaroglu’s bodyguards holding assault rifles and standing on stage with him as he delivers a speech, the first of his campaign.

A source in the Republican People’s Party (CHP), led by Kilicdaroglu, said the main opposition leader, 74, was wearing a steel vest and that security had been stepped up after receiving information that he might be attacked.

Who is Kilicdaroglu, the opposition candidate for the presidency of Turkey

The incumbent’s number one opponent, a slender man with a thin white moustache, casts himself as the “Mr. Clean” of Turkish politics, decrying years of corruption he says is rampant at the top of the state.

He promises to continue paying his water and electricity bills as president and to return to the historic Çankaya presidential palace, rather than move to the lavish 1,100-room palace Erdogan built on a wooded hill to protect from Ankara.

“He looks like us. He understands people,” 20-year-old Kilicdaroglu supporter Alayna Erdem said excitedly at a campaign rally in Istanbul, AFP notes.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu also promises not to seize power after the “restoration of democracy” and limit the powers of the president. He says he will pass on the baton and retire to take care of his grandchildren, he says. “I’m not an ambitious person,” he told Time magazine in April.

Since taking office as president of the CHP, founded by the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, he has changed the party’s line, changing its very secular image. In late 2022, he proposed a law guaranteeing Turkish women the right to wear the headscarf, an initiative approved by conservative voters.

Kilicdaroglu, who was born to a modest family in the historically rebellious Kurdish and Alevi province of Dersim (renamed Tunceli, in eastern Anatolia), is simultaneously trying to court the Kurds, many of whom affectionately call him “Piro”. the word for an Alevi grandfather or religious leader.

President Erdoğan calls him “Bey Kemal” (“Mr. Kemal”), using the term “bey” traditionally reserved for foreigners to make fun of him. Since the beginning of the campaign, the head of state has renamed him “Bey Bey Kemal” (pronounced “Bye, Kemal”), claiming that the Turks will “bury” him with their vote on the evening of May 14, despite several polls showing Kilicdaroglu as the favorite.

“I’m Kemal, I’m going!”

An economist by training who was appointed head of Turkey’s powerful social agency in the 1990s, he was long considered incapable of winning elections. But the double victory of CHP candidates in the 2019 municipal elections in Istanbul and Ankara, an unprecedented setback for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party, owes much to him.

Thanks to this success, the CHP leader managed to unite six opposition formations behind him this year and get the support of the main pro-Kurdish party.

He also knows who to speak with in public: the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, who are very popular among the CHP, Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, whom he wants to appoint as vice presidents, attend almost all of his campaign trips.

The opposition presidential candidate, whose highlight was the 420km march he led in 2017 between Ankara and Istanbul to denounce the jailing of a member of his party, likes to plead for patience.

One of Kilicdaroglu’s campaign posters promises his supporters that the long wait will end: “I am Kemal, I am leaving!”.

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