Anti-Erdogan alliance nears collapse over leadership spat

BLOOMBERG

Turkey’s opposition is in crisis over a failure to agree on a joint candidate to contest President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hampering a rare chance to unseat the country’s longest-serving leader at elections in less than three months.
The infighting burst into the open on Friday when the opposition bloc’s second largest party Iyi slammed the rest of the group for submitting to personal ambitions of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of CHP party, who wants to run as the bloc’s candidate.
“The alliance of six simply turned into a notary that approves one candidate,” Iyi Party head Meral Aksener said in televised comments. The alliance “ceased to be a platform of common sense where potential candidates can be debated.”
Leaders of the six—party opposition met to break the impasse after months of internal conflict that prevented them from agreeing on a name. Aksener said she proposed Istanbul and Ankara mayors, but was rebuffed by the rest of the bloc, who insisted on Kilicdaroglu. It was the 12th time the leaders had come together, but their failure to reach an agreement has exposed them to frequent attacks from Erdogan.
While Aksener refrained from pulling out of the alliance, her public criticism of the suggestions of alternative candidates make it increasingly likely that the anti-Erdogan camp will unravel.
The deepening crisis among opposition parties with less than three months left before the elections spurred a sharp drop in Turkish markets, with the benchmark stop index falling as much as 3.9% as Aksener spoke. The Borsa Istanbul 100 index was trading 2% lower as of 4:01 pm in Istanbul.
The Turkish president accused opposition parties of being disorganised, telling the electorate that they remain too divided on important issues to run the country.
A day before the opposition’s last summit, Erdogan called for presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14, quashing speculation the vote would be postponed following two deadly earthquakes.
It will remain the toughest electoral race of Erdogan’s two decades in power. He’s stepped up a multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort after last month’s disaster that leveled cities and killed more than 45,000 people, after the government faced sharp criticism for the initial quake response.
The opposition has failed to effectively communicate its policy on vital topics from the economy to international relations, said Bekir Agirdir, head of the Konda polling agency. It should have the upper hand due to the government’s perceived bungled crisis response, but it’s missed the mark.
“Its continued infighting over the candidate coupled with its failure to convey its main vision on critical matters are hampering its chances,” said Agirdir, whose agency successfully predicted the margin of victory for local elections in 2019, when opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu took Istanbul.
Surveys consistently show a decline in support for the opposition bloc, though the numbers remain too close to predict a winner. Early last year, more voters predicted the opposition would win. But sentiment has gradually changed in Erdogan’s favour in the last few months.