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CNN
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Until Sunday, Sinan Ogan was a fringe ultranationalist Turkish politician virtually unknown outside Turkey. But for the the next two weekshe could become the most important figure in Turkish politics, potentially deciding the president That of Recep Tayyip Erdogan political destiny
Turkey’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) said on Monday that neither Erdogan nor his main rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu he received more than 50% of the votes needed to be president, taking the race to a runoff.
Preliminary results from the YSK showed that Erdogan had received 49.51% of the vote, while Kilicdaroglu had 44.88%.
Ogan, the third candidate, received 5.17%, enough to swing the vote in favor of either candidate. With this, he found himself as the king in the most important election in modern Turkish history.
The 55-year-old wanted to avoid throwing his weight behind the two candidates.
“We will consult with our voter base for our decision in the second round,” he told Reuters on Monday. “But we already made it clear that the fight against terrorism and the return of refugees are our red lines.”
Murat Somer, a political science professor at Istanbul’s Koc University, said Ogan is critical of both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu, but most of his voters are closer to the president than to his main rival, noting that the results of the parliamentary elections already gave Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu. his Justice and Development Party (AK). a main advantage.
“Kilicdaroglu needs to explain how he can govern stably with an AKP-controlled parliament,” he told CNN. “He also has to find a way to get Ogan’s endorsement, but it won’t be easy.”
Berkay Mandiraci, a Turkey analyst at the Belgium-based think tank International Crisis Group, said on Twitter that the momentum is in Erdogan’s favor, adding that opinion polls suggesting otherwise before the voting failed to capture an underground current in favor of the ruling alliance. .
“(There were) very few changes compared to the 2018 election despite the economic challengesthe covid-19 pandemic and devastating earthquakes,” he wrote.
It’s unclear whether Ogan will set conditions for his support of either candidate, and what they might be, but his past political affiliations and positions may give an indication of how his supporters might vote.
Ogan said Sunday night that Turkish nationalists and Kemalists will be the “determinants of the second round.” Kemalism refers to the decidedly secular and pro-republican state ideology of Turkey as envisioned by its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) of Kilicdaroglu is the main Kemalist party in the country, established by the founder of the Turkish republic himself. In recent years he has softened his stance on the role of religion in the country and that of the Kurds, a major ethnic minority that has long complained of persecution and from which anti-state militancy has sometimes emerged. For Sunday’s election, he wooed defectors from Erdogan’s Islamist-leaning AK party and even received an endorsement from the pro-Kurdish party HDP and its leader imprisoned.
How does the voting process work in Turkey? I caught up @ertim_orkun of ‘Vote and Beyond’ at a voting center in Istanbul to see it first hand. “I think the system is pretty safe,” he said. #Elections in Turkey pic.twitter.com/KCNmW9cBjs
— Becky Anderson (@BeckyCNN) May 14, 2023
Somer said Ogan’s policies are anti-immigrant and anti-PKK, referring to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is officially considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. He finds the HDP’s support for Kilicdaroglu problematic, Somer said, but also opposes Erdogan joining forces with the Islamist Huda Par (Free Cause) party, which is affiliated with the Sunni Kurdish Islamist Hezbollah.
Asked by reporters in March whether he would support Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu in the event of a runoff, Ogan said his party would examine each candidate’s “national positions and competences” as well as “the situation of affiliation with terrorism and seeking assistance to terrorism”. .”
“We will decide with common sense,” Ogan said. “Common sense shows us that we may not be able to promise heaven, but it is time to close the gates of hell.”
Ogan ran for the presidency as a candidate of the ATA alliance of like-minded nationalist parties. But his political career began with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), where he spent six years before breaking away from it, partly because of his growing closeness to Erdogan’s AK Party , according to Turkish media.
Formerly in opposition, the MHP joined the People’s Alliance led by Erdogan’s AK party in this election.
Ceylan Akca, a Left Green Party parliamentary candidate in the largely Kurdish province of Diyarbakir, said Ogan’s votes show the rise of a right-wing, nationalist and anti-refugee wave in Turkey.
“The Kurds have made their decision. They supported Mr. Kilicdaroglu, and the votes for him are huge in the Kurdish parts of the country,” Akca, who is also linked to the HDP, told CNN. “The Kurdish community has done its part, now it’s up to the Turks to protect the country “.
Somer said Sunday’s election results made clear how polarized Turkey has become.
“When society is divided into two rigid ossified blocks that see each other as an existential threat, that’s really hard to overcome,” he said, adding that despite the opposition’s attempts to overcome the nation’s faults, could not do so successfully. .
