Turkey is gearing up for tomorrow’s second round of its presidential election after the end of yesterday’s election campaign, which was full of promises and curses against Kurds and Syrian refugees from the two rivals.

In the second round of the competition, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is ahead of his opponent Kemal Kılıçdaroglu (44.5), a candidate from a heterogeneous broad-spectrum six-party alliance, by almost five points (49.5%), or 2.5 million votes, or 2. 5 million votes. from the nationalist right to the centre-left.

The latest opinion polls – the institutions that conduct them, are far behind the first round – state the leadership of the head of state, ahead of him by five points.

Despite this arithmetic, a priori favoring the dominance of the political game in Turkey over the past twenty years, an unknown variable still remains: it is 8.3 million votes of citizens that were not expressed in the first round, although participation reached 87%.

Already in the Turkish diaspora, whose members had to vote before Tuesday evening, the turnout was higher (1.9 million versus 1.69 million) than in the first round.

In addition to those who chose to abstain, two camps flirted after 14 May with the ultranationalists.

The runner-up in the first round, Sinan Ogan (5% of the vote), a former MHP official, sided with Erdogan.

The attempt to appeal to far-right voices completely changed the structure of the campaign.

Shocked by his unexpected defeat in the first round, 74-year-old Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu disappeared from TV screens the day after the election, only to reappear on the fourth day, presenting himself as a militant candidate.

Smiles and hearts at his campaign rallies were replaced by clenched fists and promises to send Syrian refugees home “the day after the victory.” He repeated the threat a few days later, assuring that Turkey would not turn into a “warehouse for immigrants.”

Then he somewhat softened his position on the Syrians and called on Europe to pay the promise. “We will fix the situation, you will see,” he told the youth.

Turkey, with at least 3.4 million Syrian refugees (according to official figures), not counting the hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iranians and Iraqis on its territory, is currently the host country for the most refugees in the world.

On the other hand, 69-year-old President Erdogan, even more encouraged by the results of the first round, delivered speech after speech – last weekend he gave three a day … – denouncing his “terrorist” opponents, for which he accuses them of cooperation with the HDP and “LGBTQI” who, he reiterates, threaten the core values ​​of the family. “Yesterday they still loved terrorists,” he joked in one of his speeches.

Downhill

“I have been covering election campaigns for decades, I have never seen so much ‘fake news’, so many offensive and homophobic statements,” said Can Dudar, former editor-in-chief of the center-left newspaper Cumhuriyet. , exiled to Berlin, who says he is saddened that the opposition has not reacted “properly” and “has not called for minimal respect.”

Menderes Chinar, professor of political science at Basket University (Ankara), criticized the opposition, which seemed to “fail to present its own vision of Turkey’s future” and projected “only the failures of the government and the president.”

But, he added, “even if voters disagree with some of the parties in the alliance, they cannot afford not to vote.”

The HDP probably agrees. Despite repeated attacks on it, and despite Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu’s recent alliance with a small ultra-nationalist xenophobic faction, the party on Thursday again urged its supporters to vote for the opposition candidate.

And yesterday, on Twitter, HDP activist Selahattin Demirtas, who has been in prison since 2016, repeated yesterday’s call from his cell: “There is no third round in this story! Let’s elect Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu as president so that Türkiye can breathe. Go to the polls, vote.”

Last night, Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu accused the authorities of preventing him from sending a text message in which he wanted to inform journalists that he would be participating in a private TV program.

According to him, the obstruction was made by the “Control Department of Information and Communication Technologies (BTS) on the orders of Erdogan.” He added that the president’s people did it “because they are afraid.”

The non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, RSF) criticizes the imbalance in the promotion of candidates – the head of state has monopolized television screens.

For Erol Enteroglu, the RSF representative in Turkey, the “established media system” is in itself a means of electoral fraud, as it “deprives” Turkish citizens of democratic dialogue.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.