The chances of Recep Tayyip Erdogan being re-elected as Turkey’s president have increased further since Monday afternoon. The far-right Sinan Ogan, eliminated in the first round, has announced on television his explicit support for Erdogan in the second round, to be held this Sunday.
“I ask the voters who voted for us in the first round to do so for Erdogan in the second,” said Ogan, who obtained 5.2% of the vote, third in the running, two Sundays ago. This is a gift for the current head of state, who was on the brink of victory in the first round, with 49.5% of the vote.
Ogan, until recently a semi-unknown figure in Turkey, did unexpectedly well for a platform based on Turkish ultranationalism and xenophobia. His status as a candidate of the Ancestral Alliance formed for the occasion, had the support of small marginal parties with no other banner than that, besides his own.
The appetite for these ultranationalist votes led the candidate who will compete with Erdogan in the second round, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, to raise his xenophobic profile. In this way, he broadcast a video in which he spoke of “ten million regular immigrants” who “soon could be thirty million.” Actually, five million is the number usually considered. In any case, already before the elections, the Kemalist candidate Kiliçdaroglu had promised to return the 3.5 million Syrian refugees to his country “within two years”.
The credentials of his Nationalist Alliance, bolstered by his promises of quick expulsions, landed Kiliçdaroglu an interview with the head of the xenophobic Victory Party, which in the first round supported Sinan Ogan. The possibility of a declaration by the latter in favor of Kiliçdaroglu (Alevi and Social Democrat) came to circulate.
However, Ogan’s interview, hours later, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself, fueled a lurch in his direction that finally took place this Monday. It is still not clear what the Popular Alliance candidate would have promised the far-right in exchange for his explicit support. Last week, Ogan put on the table obtaining a ministry or a vice presidency as requirements for any of the presidential candidates.
In any case, the vote is free, beyond the orientation that Ogan can give, whose party hardly has any cadres or members. Although the complicity with the Turkish deep state of the former deputy -for the MHP- Sinan Ogan, well-versed in matters of strategy, from Central Asia and a speaker of Russian and English, cannot be overlooked. He himself is of Azeri origin.
In fact, the MHP, the far-right party that has great sympathy among the security forces and whose youth are the Gray Wolves -infamous for its anti-leftist gunmen in the 1970s- is in all the sauces. Its current leader, Bahçeli, who retains the acronym, supports ERdogan’s alliance, while one of its former leaders, who split to create the Good Party, supports Kiliçdaroglu. Ogan finally articulated his own ultra alliance, before expressing his support for Erdogan on Monday.
The reason given is “stability”. Therefore, in the event of a victory for Erdogan, now more likely, there will be no swing in relations with Russia and in relation to the war in Ukraine, where Turkey has maintained a position of constructive neutrality in favor of peace negotiations. .
What must have tipped the scales, however, is the evidence that if Kiliçdaroglu has succeeded in starting a second round, it has continued thanks to the tactical support of voters for the Kurdish revolutionary movement, HDP, seen by many Turks as the political front of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrilla.