Expert practitioner on Turkey, author of the Telegram channel “Turkey is” Ivan Starodubtsev on March 7, in an interview with Izvestia, assessed the chances of the leader of the “People’s Republican Party” Kemal Kılıçdaroglu to win the presidential elections in Turkey.
As Starodubtsev explained, the opposition coalition in this country consists of six political parties. At the same time, only two of them – the Republican People’s Party and the Good Party – are the main ones, the rest are minority shareholders.
“Kılıçdaroğlu did not hide his presidential ambitions very well for many years. Although for the past year he has been misleading his opposition partners when he said that chairmen of parties forming an opposition bloc should not become candidates for the presidency. For a whole year, the issue of candidacy for the presidency was brought to the background by him. He said that the most important thing is to change the current government in Turkey,” the expert said.
Then, as Starodubtsev noted, Kılıçdaroğlu’s position changed, he publicly spoke about his ambitions for the post of head of the Turkish state.
“Kılıçdaroğlu was supported by four minority parties, which led observers to believe that behind the back of the Good Party, its head Meral Aksener, he was conducting separate negotiations. According to sociology, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is a candidate who cannot beat Erdoğan. Meral Aksener invited her partners to take this sociological ground. They refused, and as a result, the continued presence of the Good Party, taking into account these separate negotiations, became unacceptable for Meral Aksener from all points of view,” he said.
The interlocutor of Izvestia added that the split in the Turkish opposition is a positive factor for the current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“The fact that the opposition failed to agree on a single candidate seriously strengthened Erdogan’s position. As many observers said, they literally gave power to Erdogan, ”concluded Starodubtsev.
On March 1, Amur Gadzhiev, a researcher at the Center for the Study of the Countries of the Near and Middle East of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Izvestiya that the ratings of the Turkish leader and the ruling coalition had risen after the earthquakes that occurred in the country.
At the same time, Erdogan confirmed his decision to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14.
