Turkey's Erdogan Faces Biggest Election Challenge

Date: 22 June 2018 - 21:14

News ID: ۵۴۲۳۱

ANKARA (Dispatches) – After dominating Turkish politics for a decade and a half, President Tayyip Erdogan now faces his biggest electoral challenge, from a combative former teacher who has revitalized a dispirited opposition in less than two months.
Turkey holds presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday that are among the most important in its modern history. The winner of the presidential race will acquire sweeping new executive powers under a constitutional shake-up that Turkish voters narrowly approved in a referendum last year.
By calling early polls - they were originally set for November 2019 - Erdogan appeared to have wrongfooted his foes. But they have gained momentum with the nomination of Muharrem Ince last month as the candidate of the main opposition party, though Erdogan is still tipped to win.
A former physics teacher from northwest Turkey, Ince is an outspoken lawmaker of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP). Unlike many CHP politicians drawn from the Western-facing elite, he comes from a pious Sunni Muslim family.
Ince is given to folk dancing and riding tractors on visits to rural areas and sometimes dons a farmer’s cap. His sister, who wears a headscarf, occasionally joins him at rallies.
Erdogan says he might seek to form a coalition government if his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) fails to secure a majority in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.
"If it is under 300 [seats], then there could be a search for a coalition,” the Turkish leader said in an interview with Kral FM radio station, adding, however, that the probability of this scenario would be "very, very low.”
Erdogan has long been an ardent critic of coalition governments, believing that the fractious coalition politics was responsible for hampering the Turkish government in the 1990s. Back in May 2015, he even hailed Italy for adopting a law that banned the formation of coalition governments.
The Turkish leader also believes that coalition governments, formed through parliamentary systems, are all against stability in any given country, unlike a presidential system, which boosts stability.
Back in April, Erdogan said parliamentary elections would be brought forward to June 24, more than a year earlier than planned, so that the president could take on executive powers as authorized in last year's referendum on constitutional reforms.
He argued that his administration was facing numerous legal problems, including economic challenges and the war in Syria that could be solved only with a more powerful presidency.
The AKP has maintained its majority in parliament for nearly all of its almost 16 years in power, only losing it in the June 2015 vote. However, parties failed to form a coalition at the time and Erdogan called a new election in November that year, restoring once again the AKP’s majority.
So far, opinion polls on average have placed the incumbent president around 20 percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Ince of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
However, if the election goes to a second round between the two candidates, who get the most votes, parties in the "Nation Alliance” that includes the CHP have said they would call on voters to support the alliance’s second-round candidate.