In early March, six Turkish opposition parties, meeting in what has been called the “Table of Six”, chose a single candidate to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the presidential elections to be held in May:
it is Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party. Kilicdaroglu is 74 years old and has been the head of the CHP for almost 15. He is a very popular politician but not very charismatic, and this is one of the reasons why his appointment was met with some reticence within the opposition coalition itself.
Kilicdaroglu is a politician universally known for his honesty and frugality, who over the years has been able to obtain some important electoral victories despite Erdogan’s progressive and increasingly oppressive authoritarianism, which has gradually reduced and threatened the independence of the media, the judicial system and many other Turkish institutions.
However, Kilicdaroglu’s united candidacy has created great skepticism within his own coalition, to the point of endangering its existence. The Table of Six is extremely diverse and includes parties ranging from the centre-left to the nationalist right, which have coalesced around some reforms of principle (for example: abolishing presidentialism and reducing the concentration of power in the hands of the president) and above all in the name of the last-ditch attempt to oust Erdogan from power, who has held it uninterruptedly for more than twenty years and who has managed to win almost all the elections in which he has participated.
The CHP, Kilicdaroglu’s party, has long been the main Turkish opposition party: it was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the “founding father” of Turkey, has centre-left positions and is openly secular. In the polls it is given to about 25 percent of the votes. The second party in the coalition is the secular nationalist right-wing Good Party (IYI), which has less than 15 percent of the vote. IYI is led by Meral Aksener, one of the few leading female politicians in the country who is very charismatic.
On March 3, Aksener withdrew from the coalition arguing that Kilicdaroglu was not a suitable candidate to beat Erdogan, and that it would have been better to nominate Ekrem Imamoglu (of the CHP) or Mansur Yavas (of the IYI), popular mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, winners of the 2019 administrative elections. According to polls, in fact, both Imamoglu and Yavas are more popular than Kilicdaroglu, but neither of them has the same ability to keep the broad coalition of the Table of Six united.
After three very hectic days, Aksener finally decided to rejoin the coalition, when Kilicdaroglu promised that, if elected, he would appoint Imammoglu and Yavas as his vice presidents.
Skepticism
Aksener’s doubts about Kilicdaroglu are shared by many analysts. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s most charismatic politician and one of the most talented speakers of his generation. His public gatherings, the Economist recently wrote, have the exalted atmosphere of rock concerts. On the contrary, Kilicdaroglu has a very modest manner, he is a mediocre speaker and his speeches seem more like the lessons of a good professor.
In fact, Kilicdaroglu is more of a bureaucrat than a politician: despite coming from a family of very humble origins, he graduated in Economics from one of the most prestigious universities in Ankara, the Turkish capital, and spent most of his career in the state bureaucracy. Only in 2002, at the age of 54, was he elected to parliament and began a gradual climb up the ranks of the CHP.
Kilicdaroglu’s all in all passive and resigned leadership as leader of the opposition was revitalized in 2017: in that year his deputy, Enis Berberoglu, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges that in all likelihood were politically motivated, in the It was part of a wider wave of arrests and repression that followed the attempted coup against Erdogan the year before.
