Erdoğan promises an aggressive campaign, ambitious presidency

Murat Yetkin murat.yetkin@hdn.com.tr

Though it was not a surprise at all, some 4,000 supporters who were invited to Ankara for the occasion stood up in cheers and slogans to welcome Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s candidacy to become Turkey’s next president.

On July 1, Erdoğan became the third candidate to become the 12th president of the Turkish Republic. His competitors are Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, a non-partisan academic supported by two opposition parties – namely the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – and Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-leader of the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP).

But Erdoğan considers neither of them to be serious rivals. He made clear in an hour long speech on July 1 that he wanted to be elected president in the first round of elections on Aug. 10 in which a 50 percent plus one vote is needed.

Erdoğan has passed that threshold, that rare 50 percent, once before in the 2011 general elections. And in the local elections on March 30 he managed to attract a dear 45 percent despite the wave of corruption allegations against members of his party, government and even family. So he sees the 50 percent threshold as a reachable target, with a little bit of a push, as a number of polls ordered by his AK Parti have shown.

On the other hand, the presence of these two candidates is no joke, no matter what the Erdoğan propaganda campaign has started to tell people. This is because the first target of the supporters of both candidates is to keep Erdoğan below 50 percent and to try and hit him hard in the second round, on Aug. 24, where only two candidates will be trying their...