Turkey: Presidential and legislative elections will take place on May 14, confirms Erdogan

First modification: 01/23/2023 – 01:53

Turkish voters will go to the polls in four months.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the head of Turkey since 2003 and who hopes to continue for another five years, confirmed on Sunday, January 22, the date of May 14 for the holding of presidential and legislative elections.

“I will use my authority to bring the elections forward to May 14,” the president told a videotaped meeting with young people in Bursa, the main industrial city in the west.

“It is not about early elections (…) but about an adjustment to take into account (the date) of the elections,” he justified while the initial date was scheduled for June 18.

A crucial election meeting

With exceptional political longevity in Turkey and more broadly in Europe, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister since 2003, amended the Constitution to become President in 2014, directly elected by universal suffrage and will, at age 69 (next month), candidate for his own succession.

This electoral meeting will be crucial for its future and that of the country, plunged into a serious economic crisis but the centerpiece of the region’s geopolitical tableau: Ankara has offered to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, two belligerents at its doors with whom it shares the shores of the Black Sea.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already brought forward this week the date of May 14, the anniversary of the electoral triumph of the Democratic Party (conservative) in 1950: without clearly announcing the day of the election, he had indicated on Wednesday that it would take place “73 years” after this victory.

The opposition, which intends to present a united front of the six main parties -minus the HDP (pro-Kurdish democratic left), the third force in Parliament- and above all a single candidate, must announce the name of the latter at the end of this month. The electoral campaign will begin, therefore, 60 days before, that is, on “March 10,” the president also indicated.

The AKP, the instrument of his rise

May 14, 1950 marks the victory of Adnan Menderes, an emblematic figure of the Turkish conservative right, ending the reign of the party of Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk”, the father of modern Turkey.

Adnan Menderes, founder in 1946 of the Democratic Party, had been overthrown by a military coup in 1960 and executed a year later and his party was dissolved. The May 14 election sends a clear signal to the conservative fringe of the electorate.

Tall – he frequently dominates his interlocutors – Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former soccer player who dreamed of a professional career, has reigned in Turkey for two decades, practically undisputed, although he refutes the term “dictator” labeled by the British weekly ‘The Economist’ this week.

“A flawed democracy could turn into a full-fledged autocracy. Turkey is on the brink of disaster under its increasingly erratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”

Elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, the ideal springboard for a national career, he was sentenced in 1998 for having recited a poem with Islamist overtones, an episode that only reinforced his aura.

Released after four months in detention, Recep Tayyip Erdogan had shortly thereafter founded the AKP, which became the instrument of his rise. His accession to the post of prime minister in 2003 ushered in a decade of unprecedented economic growth and political stability in modern Turkey.

But starting in 2013, faced with an unprecedented youth protest movement across Turkey, unreceptive to the conservative Islamist model promoted by the AKP, it responded with relentless repression.

The authoritarian drift of his power that began that year was accentuated after the AKP’s first electoral defeat in the 2015 legislatures, then with the attempted coup in July 2016.

The president, who has seen his popularity fall in recent years, will, however, try to convince his fellow citizens once again that he is the man they need.

with AFP