ANKARA-Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power was ushered in by the contentious political aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake. So when another devastating quake laid waste to large swathes of southeast Turkey earlier this year, many observers expected the president’s two-decade rule to end with a full circle.
Instead, Erdogan appears to have defied the odds. The first round of Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary voting on May 14 made him the frontrunner in the race that pollsters predicted could unseat him.
He won a nearly five-point lead over his principal rival, opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, and fell less than half a percentage point short of the 50% threshold required for victory. His parliamentary bloc won a comfortable majority in the legislature. This week, the third-place presidential candidate Sinan Ogan, publicly endorsed Erdogan, further boosting his chances against Kilicdaroglu in the run-off election on Sunday. “It will be the people who will be the kingmakers, and when the people decide, I believe they will stand with those who have successfully served the Turkish nation for the last 21 years,” Erdogan told CNN’s Becky Anderson in an exclusive interview last week. During that interview, the president tried to burnish his credentials, skirting over the country’s years-long financial crisis and his government’s shortcomings in rescue operations after the catastrophic February earthquake. He dismissed the 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu as a political amateur. The two rivals have fashioned their campaigns as an array of contrasts. While Erdogan aimed to showcase his political prowess and repeatedly touted Turkey’s rapidly growing defense industry, Kilicdaroglu presented himself as the quintessential technocrat: softspoken, level-headed and conciliatory.
Six right- and left-wing opposition groups united behind Kilicdaroglu in an unprecedented bid to unseat the sitting president, and cast a wide net over Turkish voters. They hoped to seize on public disgruntlement over a floundering economy and the aftermath of the quake. Erdogan, on the other hand, focused on reinvigorating his conservative strongholds. The men concluded their election campaigns with a similar public flourish. Erdogan prayed at the Hagia Sophia, the Istanbul mosque and former church which the Turkish government in 1934 turned into a museum out of respect for both its Byzantine and Ottoman histories. Erdogan controversially annulled that decision in 2020, one of the many populist moves that have peppered his career.