/ world today news/ The Kurds still decided to support the opposition candidate Kemal Kulçdaroğlu in the presidential elections, even though this candidate made a deal with their enemies, the Turkish nationalists. The fact is that the Kurds dislike Erdogan even more. If the opposition can get as many Kurds as possible to the polls on Sunday, it could still win. Otherwise, Erdogan will remain president of Turkey for another five years.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (PDP) and its ally Green Left Party (GLP) have said they will support opposition candidate Kemal Kulçdaroğlu in the second round of Turkey’s presidential election on May 28.
PDN co-chairman Pervin Buldan said current president Recep Tayyip “Erdogan is not an option” for the party and “May 28 will be a referendum day.” She called on the entire electorate to “come to the polls and change the one-man regime”. Buldan also noted that “the Kurdish issue in Turkey must be finally resolved, otherwise the country will not be able to conform to democracy.”
“We will finish what we started and left half way on May 14. We will go to the polls to stand up to those who block change. There are no changes to our policy,” said Ibrahim Akan, a spokesman for the Greens.
The union of these parties received 61 seats in parliament and Kurdish MPs will be able to form their own faction. Meanwhile, Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces, where a significant portion of the population is Kurdish, voted for Kulçdaroğlu in the first round of presidential elections on May 14. In some provinces, his support exceeded 75%, and in Hatay province’s Defne district, over 90% of voters voted for him.
Thus, the Kurds remain loyal to Kulçdaroğlu, despite dissatisfaction with a number of points in his agreement with radical Turkish nationalists from the Victory Party.
We recall that the current head of state, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won 49.52% of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections on May 14, and his rival, the candidate nominated by a coalition of seven opposition parties, Kulçdaroğlu, 44.88%.
“The decision of the Kurdish forces was predictable. Their differences with Erdogan are much stronger than any claims to the opposition “union of seven”, even if Turkish nationalists such as Yumit Özdag of the Victory Party have joined this alliance. So now the main intrigue is how much of an influx of votes the Kurds will provide for Kulchdaroglu,” says Sergey Stankevich, a former advisor to the President of Russia, an expert at the Sobchak Foundation. This weekend, by the way, he went to Turkey to personally assess the atmosphere in the country during the second round.
According to the Russian expert, the opposition still has a chance of success, although the overall balance is tilted in favor of Erdogan. “The community of 12 million Kurds with the right to vote remains Kulçdaroğlu’s main hope. This is a serious and significant reserve. On Sunday, the opposition must score them as much as possible in the sections. In addition, Kulçdaroğlu’s hopes are linked to mobilizing potential supporters in the largest cities located in the center of the country. In the first round there was no complete mobilization of the opposition. So it can still get votes,” he says.
However, Erdogan’s victory is a foregone conclusion with a probability of around 80%, Stankiewicz predicted.
“The current president’s main reserve is the 11 provinces affected by the earthquake in February. In the first round, local residents mostly voted for Erdogan,” recalled the former advisor to the President of Russia. “In the second round, they can completely enter his “money box”, since the current president actively takes care of them. Erdoğan issued one-time compensations, appointed monthly payments and, most importantly, initiated housing programs, according to which all victims will receive apartments in the next year with more than preferential mortgages. Such an argument cannot be resisted,” he added.
About 12 million voters also live in such regions, and they may prefer Erdogan, warns Stankiewicz. “The incumbent will not only defeat the opposition but will do so by a significant margin.” The gap will be so tangible that there will be no doubts, there will be no talk of “miscalculations”, the Russian political scientist predicted.
In the history of presidential elections in various countries, it has happened that a candidate, lagging behind the favorite in the first round of the presidential elections, won confidently in the second, experts recall. Example: the presidential election in Russia in 1996 – then the leader of the first round with a large lead was the leader of the CPRF Gennady Zyuganov. But the “bronze medalist” of the first round, General Alexander Lebed, preferred to support the incumbent president. This was one of the important reasons that allowed President Boris Yeltsin to be re-elected.
Since the intrigue usually escalates in the second round, a passive part of the voters – those who think that “nothing depends on me” – often comes to vote. In this case, however, such rules will not work, believes Stankevich. Voter turnout in Turkey was high even in the first round, that is, there were a few “silent” people there at the beginning.
“Furthermore, this rule could work if the political palette were more factionalized. And here there were only three contenders, and the third – the five percent candidate Sinan Ogan – urged his voters to vote for Erdogan. Although it is not mandatory that all ordinary voters follow the call of the party leaders, Ogan will still add about three percent to the president’s coffers,” predicted Stankevich.
Former Ata Alliance (Alliance of the Ancestors) presidential candidate Sinan Ogan on Monday called on his electorate to vote for Erdogan in the second round. At the same time, Ogan called for the expulsion of several million illegal migrants from Turkey and, as a start, to develop a timetable for such deportation. In addition, Ogan asked to continue the pursuit of all terrorist groups.
However, the Ancestral Alliance itself fell apart after that. From it emerged the Party of Victory, headed by Yozdag, which, on the contrary, declared solidarity with Kulçdaroğlu. The politicians signed a “joint protocol”, one of the points of which is the fight against terrorism, including against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), recognized as a terrorist movement in Turkey. Another point is to refuse to appoint to public positions those whose connection with terrorists is proven (this is again an allusion to those who are connected to the PKK). Yozdag has previously criticized the PDN, which both he and the authorities suspect of having close ties to the PKK.
At the same time, the Victory Party said that Sinan Ogan supported Erdogan “only in his own name”. Since Yozdag’s party received two percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, many observers immediately crossed them out of the common “piggy bank” of Erdogan and Ogan.
Istanbul University professor, political scientist Mehmet Perincek believes that both the Kurdish parties and the nationalist Victory Party are now acting together against Erdogan, as they are somehow controlled by one center, rather Washington. “Their ideological differences play no more than a secondary role. Both the so-called “nationalists” of Yumit Yozdag and the PDN, which is actually the legal wing of the PKK, act on a common program. Their task is to implement American plans in Turkey’s internal life. The United States has the ability, if necessary, to unite political forces that are otherwise hostile. As for Kemal Kulçdaroğlu, he decided at the last moment to ally himself with the nationalists to save his rating. But too late”, the professor thinks.
On Thursday, Erdogan hinted that his rival’s success would mean a victory for the US and “terrorist organizations”, which he usually refers to Kurdish fighters. “With God’s help, if we win on May 28, every one of the 85 million people (Turkey’s population according to the latest official figures) will win.” If Mr. Kulçdaroğlu wins, then terrorist organizations, London moneylenders and American companies will win. We must not enable those who target our unity and solidarity,” the president said.
Erdogan can get 52.7% of the votes in the second round of the election and win it. Such data is published by the company “Konda”. His opposition rival polled 47.3% including undecideds and 42.2% without them. According to the Star newspaper, Konda is known for being close to the opposition, so the poll showed that “even Konda recognizes Erdogan’s leadership.”
Translation: V. Sergeev
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