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Turkey’s opposition is in crisis over the failure to agree on a joint candidate to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hindering a rare opportunity to unseat the country’s longest-serving leader in elections in less than three months.
Opposition leaders from six parties met on Thursday to break the deadlock after months of internal conflict that prevented them from agreeing on a name. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition party CHP, came forward again but failed to gain the support of the bloc’s second largest member, the IYI party, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Meral Aksener, head of IYI, will either go along with the rest of the bloc or announce a separate candidate, a decision she will make on Monday after meetings with the party’s top, the people said, who spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm. share the sensitive information.
Thursday’s meeting marked the 12th time opposition leaders have met, but their failure to agree on who should attend left them subject to frequent attacks from Erdogan. The Turkish president accused them of being disorganized and told voters they remain too divided on important issues to run the country.
A day before the last opposition summit, Erdogan called for presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14.
May elections
It will remain the toughest election race of Erdogan’s two decades in power. He has ramped up multibillion-dollar reconstruction after last month’s disaster that flattened cities and killed more than 45,000 people after the government faced sharp criticism over its initial quake response.
Konda polling station chief Bekir Agirdir said the opposition has failed to effectively communicate its policies on key issues from economics to international relations. It should have the upper hand because of the government’s allegedly clumsy crisis response, but the target has been missed.
“The ongoing power struggle over the candidate coupled with the inability to convey his key vision on critical issues hampers his chances,” said Agirdir, whose agency successfully predicted the profit margin for local elections in 2019 when opposition Ekrem Imamoglu Istanbul took.
Surveys consistently show a decline in support for the opposition bloc, although the numbers are too close to predict a winner. At the beginning of last year, more voters predicted that the opposition would win. But sentiment has gradually swung in favor of Erdogan in recent months.
The Turkish president, who has been given more powers since 2018, remains Turkey’s most popular politician, even though his Justice and Development Party lost some support among poor Turks, who were among the most loyal supporters.
Turks are also facing the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, which only looks set to get worse as the impact of the earthquakes seeps through the economy.
To beat Erdogan in the presidential race, opposition parties must rally behind a candidate who can gain support from the pro-Kurdish HDP, which emerged as kingmaker in previous elections but may now be suspended over alleged ties to separatist Kurdish militants.
Why the next elections in Turkey are a real test for Erdogan: QuickTake
Voters seem divided when it comes to the opposition. According to recent polls, less than half of the electorate is expected to vote for Erdogan’s AK party and nationalist allies. But those who vote for the opposition are mainly divided between the six coordinated parties and the pro-Kurdish HDP. That could allow Erdogan and his allies to divide and rule at the polls.
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