Finishing third in Turkey’s recent presidential election, the nationalist Sinan Oğan, dubbed as the ‘kingmaker’ in the upcoming run-ups, came out on Monday, May 22nd, to officially endorse incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over his main, liberal challenger, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. With the numbers firmly on his side, Erdoğan is all but sure to bag the final victory come next Sunday.
As we wrote after the initial election round that took place on May 14th, the incumbent Erdoğan surpassed both polls and general expectations by winning 49.4% of the votes in the presidential race, finishing just south of the 50% threshold needed to declare him the winner outright.
His main rival, Kılıçdaroğlu, who focused his campaign promising a complete democratic overhaul of Turkey, received only 44.9%, while the third candidate, Sinan Oğan, who ran in the colors of a nationalist opposition group, finished with 5.2%—potentially making him the ultimate decider of the outcome, provided that his voters would swing to whomever he ended up endorsing.
However, the chances for the run-up were favoring Erdoğan either way, since for Kılıçdaroğlu to win the race, the former physics teacher would have had to win over nearly all of Sinan’s voters, while the incumbent president needs only a fraction of new supporters to secure another term.
As expected, Oğan did end up standing behind Erdoğan, albeit not with the weight of his entire electoral coalition. Explaining his choice, Oğan said that Kılıçdaroğlu’s platform “could not convince us about the future and missed the mark” when it comes to Turkey’s future stability.
But as we also predicted, Oğan’s choice of backing Erdoğan ultimately came down to Kılıçdaroğlu’s relationship with one of his primary supporters, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which the nationalists would rather see banned from national-level politics.
“I’ll only support Kılıçdaroğlu if the HDP is excluded from the political system,” Oğan stated before, and judging by the development, Kılıçdaroğlu was unable to sacrifice his alliance with the Kurds in order to win favor from the ‘kingmaker.’
Clearly unimpressed by Oğan’s decision, the liberal contender took to Twitter to voice his disappointment. “It is clear who is with this beautiful country and who is with the people who are selling this beautiful country,” Kılıçdaroğlu tweeted.
But as a sign of not giving up so easily, Kılıçdaroğlu also vowed to keep on fighting until the end, touching on anti-immigration, a cornerstone of his campaign. “We are coming to save this country from terrorism and refugees,” he wrote, calling “on our 8 million citizens and our young people who did not come to the ballot box [to vote]!”
Nonetheless, Oğan’s endorsement does not automatically mean giving Erdoğan an extra 5%. Since the first round of the election, Oğan’s nationalist “Ancestral Alliance” (ATA) splintered, and two of its four parties appear to be going their own way to support Kılıçdaroğlu instead.
While the minor Justice Party got only a hundred thousand votes in the parliamentary elections and therefore poses no risk to Erdoğan’s election prospects, the anti-immigration Victory Party—the largest of ATA’s four—received 1.2 million votes, which could mean a significant boost for Kılıçdaroğlu.
That is, of course, if the Victory Party chairman, Ümit Özdağ, chooses to actually go through with the shift, which he is expected to announce later this week.
“Where the Victory Party is, the fight against terrorism and Turkey’s security is guaranteed. … We are planning to make a statement with Mr. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on Wednesday, May 24,” Özdağ said on Tuesday.
Nonetheless, even with the Victory Party on his side, it will take considerable voter mobilization for Kılıçdaroğlu to win in the end. Unfortunately for him, the numbers still favor five more years of Erdoğan’s presidency.
