Challengers to Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denounced a series of dirty tricks during this year’s presidential race in the last week before Sunday’s election, including Erdoğan airing a video falsely linking top opponent Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to terrorists and a third-party candidate claiming doctored images have surfaced featuring him in Israeli pornography.
That candidate, the Homeland Party’s Muharrem İnce (pictured), dropped out of the race on Thursday, citing “slanders” to his name. İnce spent most of his career as a member of Kılıçdaroğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) but dropped out to form the Homeland Party in 2021 after unsuccessfully challenging Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership on several occasions.
Erdoğan has ruled Turkey as either president or prime minister for 20 years and is running for reelection in a race marred by violence against his challengers, a torrent of false information identifying the CHP as a terrorist-supporting entity, and concerns that voters in regions devastated by February’s series of deadly earthquakes may be disenfranchised due to lack of infrastructure. Despite Erdoğan’s many advantages – including a united Islamist Turkish front against an opposition traditionally divided among Turkish secularists, left-wing voters, and Kurdish factions – most recent polls show Kılıçdaroğlu leading the president by anywhere between four to seven percentage points. İnce was been able to break above six percent support in the week prior to his dropping out on Thursday.
An outraged İnce claimed on Thursday that politics in Turkey had gotten dirtier than he had ever seen in his 45 years of experience and the Turkish government appeared apathetic towards protecting the reputations of civil servants.
Chairman of Homeland (Memleket) Party and presidential candidate, Muharrem Ince makes a speech as part of an election campaign ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections in Umraniye district of Istanbul, Turkiye on April 30, 2023. (Photo by Arife Karakum/Anadolu Agency via Getty)
“I was a member of parliament for five terms. I have been fighting in politics for over 40 years. What I have seen in the last 45 days, I have not seen in the last 45 years,” İnce railed in his dropping out announcement, according to the secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet. “Fake receipts, fake images … they cut an image from an Israeli porn site, cut off my head and put it on there.”
“Such slander has never been seen in the history of the republic,” the former candidate continued. “The Turkish Republic could not protect my reputation. This country’s prosecutors, the media, security could not protect my reputation.”
İnce did not blame Erdoğan for the alleged “slander,” but rather the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, one of Erdoğan’s most hated religious leaders who the president blames for the alleged failed coup against him in 2016.
While a former member of the CHP, İnce did not endorse Kılıçdaroğlu, instead insisting that he would focus on making sure his Homeland Party performed well in the parliamentary elections also scheduled for Sunday. He denied that the CHP paid him to drop out.
Kılıçdaroğlu nonetheless extended an olive branch immediately, posting a message on social media urging İnce to “put aside old frustrations” and join the coalition against the incumbent.
People in front of a poster showing the portrait of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 10, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Burak Kara/Getty)
Turks abroad have already concluded their voting and ballots are printed, so İnce technically remains an option for Turkish voters. According to a Turkish election law expert quoted by Cumhuriyet, if İnce wins the election, the second- and third-place candidates would move on to a runoff vote.
Under Turkish law, a candidate must win by over 50 percent to become president in the first round. If neither candidate wins by that margin, the top two candidates move on to a runoff vote, scheduled this year for May 28 if necessary.
Like İnce, Kılıçdaroğlu and his party have been loudly objecting to malicious depictions of their coalition throughout the race, though explicitly blaming Erdoğan. The CHP is up in arms, for example, about a video that Erdoğan played at a campaign rally on Sunday that edited a CHP campaign ad together to appear to be part of a recruitment video for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist terrorist organization. The video appeared to show a seamless transition from Kılıçdaroğlu, in a campaign ad, urging voters, “let’s go!” (“haydi!”) to PKK founder Murat Karayılan telling his terrorists to “let’s go!”
As Deutsche Welle explained on Monday, the PKK video is significantly older than the CHP campaign ad and does not appear to have any relation to Kılıçdaroğlu.
Erdoğan has repeatedly accused the CHP of allying with the PKK and the Democratic People’s Party (HDP), a pro-Kurd left-wing party popular in eastern Turkey. The HDP is not, however, allied to the PKK or part of the CHP’s opposition coalition. Kılıçdaroğlu has condemned the arrests of HDP leaders on unsubstantiated terrorist charges, most prominently the party’s presidential candidate in 2018, Selahattin Demirtaş, who ran his campaign from prison and remains there today.
“They would take Selo [Demirtaş] out of prison,” Erdoğan told supporters at a recently rally, falsely accusing Demirtaş of killing 51 people in a terrorist attack.
The Turkish site Duvar noted that the CHP has also been struggling to address fake campaign mailers attributed to Kılıçdaroğlu listing highly unsavory promises to turn off voters, such as claiming that Kılıçdaroğlu would destroy Turkey’s lucrative armed drone industry and withdraw from the disputed Eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Kılıçdaroğlu has banked on outsized support among youth voters and women disenfranchised by Erdoğan’s brand of Islamist to grant him the victory.
“We will win in the first round. I see the crowds attending the rallies. I know the youngsters. It will be women and youth who will be decisive in these polls,” Kılıçdaroğlu said on Thursday.