The first round of elections in Turkey will be held on May 14; if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, then a second round will be held on May 28. These elections can be cast as a race between two principal figures. On the one hand, there is the opposition candidate, Kamel Kilicdaroglu, who films clips from his kitchen and conveys a positive, optimistic, and unifying message of a return to a governing system with checks and balances and improved living conditions for the ordinary citizen. Against him is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who as the incumbent is assisted by all that the presidential palace has to offer, including a near-daily announcement of a new extravagant project that seeks to muster feelings of Turkish pride.
Erdogan also resorts to a narrative of intimidation and division, in which he points to enemies from the outside, primarily the United States, and from the inside, such as the LGBT community. Although public opinion polls point to a close race with a slight advantage for Kilicdaroglu, two trends stand to be of concern to the opposition candidate and his supporters. First, when the Turkish public is asked who is expected to win, since September 2022, the majority of the public consistently thinks that Erdogan will win. A second trend is that as the election date approaches, the gap in favor of Kilicdaroglu is narrowing.
In general, if there is no overwhelming victory for the opposition candidate, it will be easier for Erdogan to claim that there were frauds and force the election commission under his control to disqualify certain polling stations. In a number of previous elections and in the current one as well, there has been much emphasis by the opposition on placing observers in as many polling stations as possible to prevent fraudulent activity by Erdogan supporters. Yet given that the governmental system works in favor of the ruling president, it is clear that the need to ensure that the veracity of the elections is maintained is not an easy task for the opposition. While the 2019 local elections proved that proper vote tallying can be ensured in the country's major cities, the situation is different in rural areas, and fraud in these areas could give Erdogan a victory in what is now a close race.
The first round of elections in Turkey will be held on May 14; if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, then a second round will be held on May 28. These elections can be cast as a race between two principal figures. On the one hand, there is the opposition candidate, Kamel Kilicdaroglu, who films clips from his kitchen and conveys a positive, optimistic, and unifying message of a return to a governing system with checks and balances and improved living conditions for the ordinary citizen. Against him is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who as the incumbent is assisted by all that the presidential palace has to offer, including a near-daily announcement of a new extravagant project that seeks to muster feelings of Turkish pride.
Erdogan also resorts to a narrative of intimidation and division, in which he points to enemies from the outside, primarily the United States, and from the inside, such as the LGBT community. Although public opinion polls point to a close race with a slight advantage for Kilicdaroglu, two trends stand to be of concern to the opposition candidate and his supporters. First, when the Turkish public is asked who is expected to win, since September 2022, the majority of the public consistently thinks that Erdogan will win. A second trend is that as the election date approaches, the gap in favor of Kilicdaroglu is narrowing.
In general, if there is no overwhelming victory for the opposition candidate, it will be easier for Erdogan to claim that there were frauds and force the election commission under his control to disqualify certain polling stations. In a number of previous elections and in the current one as well, there has been much emphasis by the opposition on placing observers in as many polling stations as possible to prevent fraudulent activity by Erdogan supporters. Yet given that the governmental system works in favor of the ruling president, it is clear that the need to ensure that the veracity of the elections is maintained is not an easy task for the opposition. While the 2019 local elections proved that proper vote tallying can be ensured in the country's major cities, the situation is different in rural areas, and fraud in these areas could give Erdogan a victory in what is now a close race.