(Istanbul) Everyone was waiting for him: the ultranationalist Sinan Ogan announced Monday his support for outgoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the second round of the Turkish presidential election on Sunday.
“We will support Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the second round. I invite our voters who voted for us in the first round to support Mr. Erdogan in the second round”, declared in Ankara Mr. Ogan, third man of the presidential election.
With 5.2% of the votes collected in the first round on May 14, this fifties, dissident of the far-right MHP party, was courted by the two finalists of the election.
Mr. Erdogan won 49.5% of the vote and his opponent, the Social Democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 44.9%, or 2.5 million votes difference between the two.
“Our negotiations were conducted around the following principles: terrorism will be fought; a timetable will be established for returning the refugees; and Turkish state institutions will be strengthened,” he said.
Its result illustrates the surge of the conservative vote in favor of this election which gave the advantage to Mr. Erdogan.
The victory of the opponent Kiliçdaroglu, which seemed possible before May 14, seems more compromised than ever.
Leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) founded by the father of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu heads a coalition of six parties.
He also enjoys the support of the main pro-Kurdish HDP party, which made it difficult to associate with Sinan Ogan, even if the latter denies being “anti-Kurdish”.
It remains to be seen which candidate will be the majority of the 2.8 million votes collected by Mr. Ogan, part of the electorate of whom intended to turn their backs on Mr. Erdogan, in power for twenty years.
“Old Faces”
On Twitter, Mr. Kiliçdaroglu immediately reacted by denouncing “those who sell this beautiful homeland”.
“We come to save this country from terrorism and refugees,” he said, calling on the “eight million citizens who did not go to the polls [le 14 mai] and to all our young people.
The candidate had promised to send back the more than 3.7 million Syrian refugees as soon as he was elected.
After the first round, Sinon Ogan said he was “open to dialogue”, in a statement to AFP.
The head of state, who met him on Friday in Istanbul, had made it known that he did not need his support to win a third term.
All parties combined, the nationalists won 23% of the vote in the legislative elections which were called for May 14.
Sinan Ogan attributes his relative success to “Turkish nationalists, Kemalists, young people”, he told AFP.
They “find us modern”, “see us as the representatives of the new politics”, “more intellectual”, he affirmed.
He added that his voters “are fed up with the old faces of politics”, starting with those of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 69, and Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, 74, at the head of the CHP since 2010.
The son of a peasant, brought up in the province of Igdir (east) before studying law and political science in Turkey and then in Moscow, Sinan Ogan presents himself as a traditional defender of Turkey.
It displays a secular nationalism, faithful to the principles of the founding father of modern Turkey and the CHP party, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which distinguishes it from Erdogan’s Islamoconservative AKP party, which advocates political Islam.