Outgoing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came out on top in the first round and the polls give him a 2 million vote lead for tomorrow. But his opponent Kemal Kiliçdaroglu tried to reverse the trend until the final stretch.
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Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be in Istanbul this Saturday, May 27 for rallies in several districts, reports our correspondent in Istanbul, Anne Andlauer. Kemal Kiliçdaroglu ends his campaign in Ankara, the capital, with a meeting with low-income families, during which he should talk about his economic program. The opposition had put the economy at the heart of its campaign before the first round. But this subject, which touches the daily life of the Turks as closely as possible, was set aside in the intervening period.
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu has spent the last two weeks stigmatizing Syrian refugees to denounce the migration policy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and to play the nationalist one-upmanship.
A controversial setup
In this second campaign, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu also frequently insulted the head of state, something he had deliberately avoided doing before the first round. On Friday, he called him a liar who ” chokes in sin and filth “. They attacked a video assembled from scratch that Recep Tayyip Erdogan used for weeks to discredit his rival.
A hoax which aimed to make people believe that Kemal Kiliçdaroglu was making common cause with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group classified as terrorist. This week, Recep Tayyip Erdogan ended up recognizing half-word that it was a montage.
” He admitted during a television program on the public channel that it was a montagelaunched Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. If it’s a montage, why are you showing it to thousands of people? For someone who has fought all his life against terrorism, how can such false, immoral, mediocre statements be made? We have never witnessed such a level of defamation and mediocrity! »
Apart from the intox risks, since the start of the electoral campaign, the public television channel TRT has devoted 48 hours of airtime to Recep Tayyip Erdogan against 32 minutes for his main opponent, points out our correspondent in Istanbul, Celine Pierre-Magnani.
While the hours are now counted for the two camps a few hours before the second round of the presidential election, the majority obtained by the ruling coalition in Parliament could be enough to convince the undecided. Voting Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears today as the only solution to avoid instability at the highest level of the state.
Mobilization of the opposition to secure the results of the vote
In the first round, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu called on his voters to return home after voting, recalls our correspondent in Istanbul, Anne Andlauer. A mistake according to Ahmet Kiraz, lawyer and representative of the CHP, the party of Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. “Our members of polling stations, our observers, our lawyers found themselves alone facing groups of dozens of people organized by the AKP, the ruling party, in each polling station. This pressure meant that our observers, our members of the polling station had to give in on several occasions in the face of situations where votes for the opposition were invalidated, where votes for Erdogan which were invalid were validated… They gave in systematically. »
This time, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu demanded the presence of at least five members of the opposition in each polling station. For Ahmet Kiraz, in charge of electoral security in the second district of Istanbul, it is possible: “ Hundreds of people have called me to declare that they wish to be a member of the polling station, that they wish to be an observer, lawyers who wish to supervise… And that is general everywhere. We believe that the mobilization that did not take place in the first round will finally take place in the second round. The opposition needs this mobilization all the more because in the first round, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu obtained two million 600,000 votes less than Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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