Erdoğan eyes first-round victory in Turkish presidential election

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been declared the ruling AK Party’s official candidate in the August 2014 presidential election. The announcement in Ankara put an end to weeks of speculation that Erdoğan, who has served as prime minister since 2003 and became arguably the most influential politician in Turkey’s modern history, might endorse President Abdullah Gül for re-election until 2019. Considering that the Elections Authority has set the deadline for nominations at July 3, a three-way contest involving Prime Minister Erdoğan, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the former OIC Secretary General who was nominated jointly by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and Selahattin Demirtaş, who received endorsements from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), will settle the matter. While opposition candidates will seek to extend the race into the second round, several opinion polls indicate that Erdoğan is likely to become the country’s 12th president after the first round on August 10.

Erdoğan’s track record his most valuable asset

Just five weeks away from the first-round vote, the prime minister enjoys a clear home-field advantage over his competitors; he is a veteran of the country’s political scene. Notwithstanding his undisputed title as the favorite target of critics at home and abroad, Erdoğan remains an undeniably talented politician who has been in every living room across the nation for the past 12 years. During that period, he could easily claim, his governments jump-started the nation’s economy, addressed the grievances of conservative voters and came very close to ending a thirty-year-old violent conflict that claimed at least 50,000 lives.

In contrast, the opposition calls upon voters with İhsanoğlu, about whom the main opposition leader says, “Voters will warm up once they get to know him.” At this time, one of the greatest challenges for the İhsanoğlu campaign remains that his work with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) amounts to little when it comes to putting someone in charge of the nation’s affairs. While the candidate’s relatives and colleagues work hard to highlight his credentials during softball interviews with pro-opposition outlets, İhsanoğlu himself continues to be a nice, older gentleman whom many Turks would like as a neighbor. Despite reportedly reconciling religious values with secularist principles, he still needs to strike voters as a mover and shaker, one of the main qualities that a politician needs in a senior leadership position.

Furthermore, it would appear that the İhsanoğlu campaign will have a hard time addressing key policy issues such as the largely-unknown candidate’s take on the secularism debate and where he stands on the Kurdish peace process. As early as his first public appearance after the formal announcement, İhsanoğlu not-so-skillfully dodged a reporter’s question about secularism by asking the voters to read his books before criticising his idea; this might work wonders in academia but, let’s face it, the average voter does not have that kind of time. To make matters worse, CHP and MHP voters have traditionally had their differences over red lines. The parties have, for instance, conflicting views on whether or not allowing female public employees to wear the headscarf at work constitutes a violation of the principle of secular government. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how İhsanoğlu will reach out to Kurdish voters, whose support remains crucial and, at least thus far, elusive, while maintaining a tough stance against the Kurdish peace process, a cornerstone of the bipartisan presidential bid.

Another key issue that will come up on the campaign trail, of course, will be Turkey’s relations with the Middle East. Although the prime minister has thus far refrained from bringing up İhsanoğlu’s warm relations with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who overthrew the democratically-elected government of Mohamed Morsi last summer, there is a strong chance that the opposition candidate will have to suffer some blows from this angle once the gloves come off. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Erdoğan will find himself in a comfortable position to claim that his government assumed an ethical foreign policy and rose to the defence of oppressed people in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, to mention but a few.

Opposition campaign plagued by factions, objections

Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu’s formal announcement as the joint presidential candidate of the CHP and the MHP received a lukewarm response from opposition voters whose half-hearted support for the campaign seem primarily rooted in their dislike of the prime minister rather than the promise of meaningful chance under his challenger. Some CHP figures, however, have been more vocal in their criticism of the opposition’s choice of presidential candidate. As the Alevi diaspora in Europe refused to endorse the candidate, a group of parliamentarians moved to nominate Emine Ülker Tarhan, an ultra-secularist jurist and former minority whip, as their presidential candidate, an offer that Tarhan turned down.

The widespread view in Turkey is that Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu’s nomination represented yet another attempt by the Republican People’s Party to field a seemingly ideal candidate to avoid much-needed reforms within the organisation. The main opposition leadership had developed a similar game plan for the March 2014 local elections to nominate Mustafa Sarıgül, the independent mayor of Istanbul’s financial district, in the hopes of capitalising on the controversial politician’s perceived ability to speak to conservatives and Kurdish immigrants. This turned out to be an urban legend as the Sarıgül campaign hardly outperformed Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who made an unsuccessful bid for Istanbul mayor in 2009 before taking over as CHP chairman.

Pollsters project first-round victory for Erdoğan

Over the past two weeks, at least four different polls have projected that Prime Minister Erdoğan will clinch a first-round victory with a comfortable margin over main challenger Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu. An ORC poll showed that 54 per cent of participants favoured Erdoğan over İhsanoğlu, whose approval level in the same poll is 39.4 per cent. GENAR, another major pollster, stated that Erdoğan would score a first-round victory with 55.2 per cent. Meanwhile, a recent poll by MAK Consulting presented the most optimistic scenario for the prime minister, who, the study showed, would receive 56.1 per cent of the vote in the first round. In an interesting turn of events, opposition pollster SONAR also painted a grim picture for the opposition campaign as it found that Erdoğan would indeed become the next president with 52.6 per cent and by a 12-point margin over İhsanoğlu. All four companies indicate that the HDP’s Selahattin Demirtaş will receive between 6.5 and 9.9 per cent of the vote.

The figures show that the opposition candidate remains in dire need of publicity. Although early reports suggested that İhsanoğlu, who was born and raised in Egypt, would kick off his presidential campaign with a rally in conservative stronghold Yozgat, his father’s hometown, Ruhsar Demirel, the Nationalist Movement Party’s point of contact for the campaign, stated that they won’t be organising any campaign events for İhsanoğlu. She argued that the opposition candidate would seek to meet with more people in person and talk to local NGOs in each campaign stop. In the face of bad signs from the opposition campaign, a journalist went as far as to state jokingly that more Turks had heard of Brazilian footballer Neymar than presidential candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

World, meet President Erdoğan

The polling data, coupled with the prime minister’s popularity and the opposition campaign’s ongoing logistical and ideological troubles, all point to a first-round victory for the ruling AK Party’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Considering that it is rather difficult, if not entirely impossible, for the opposition to reduce the double-digit margin between the top contender and the runner-up, the main question in Turkish politics now is whether or not the ruling party, which has, admittedly, been organised around Erdoğan, will survive the change in leadership. Another crucial debate is how the opposition’s ninth consecutive election defeat will affect the two sponsors of the Ihsanoglu campaign.

Doğan Eşkinat is a political advisor for the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.