RPT: PREVIEW - Turkey To Hold Presidential Runoff On Sunday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 28th May, 2023) Incumbent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main opponent, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, will meet in a showdown on Sunday as polling stations across the country prepare for a runoff.

The first round two weeks ago saw Erdogan win 49.52% of the votes, and Kilicdaroglu 44.88%. To win the election, a candidate must receive a simple majority of the votes.

Former presidential candidate from the right-wing ATA alliance, Sinan Ogan, said that he would support Erdogan in the runoff.

However, Ogan might fail to mobilize enough votes for the incumbent president, President of the Turkish Foreign Policy Institute and professor of international relations at the middle East Technical University in Ankara, Huseyin Bagci, told Sputnik.

"Sinan Ogan received very strong disappointment (and) negative reaction by the public and he will not bring so much as it is expected ... The general view is that he was the winner in the first run-up but the loser in the second run-up," Bagci said, adding that female voters are particularly resentful of the ex-candidate as he belongs to the same coalition as the religious Free Cause Party.

Gareth Jenkins, a non-resident senior research fellow with the Joint Center Silk Road Studies Program and Turkey Center at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm, echoed this sentiment, saying that he does not expect all of those who voted for Ogan in the first round to follow his advice and support Erdogan in the runoff, but "enough will do so to give Erdogan the votes he needs."

Additionally, people would want to avoid the potential instability from having the presidency controlled by one alliance and parliament by another, Jenkins argued.

The experts' opinions diverged on the runoff results, as Jenkins expects Erdogan to "comfortably win" it, while Bagci believes the upcoming vote "will not be easy this time" for the incumbent president.

Turkey's relations with Russia are poised to grow "less friendly" if Kilicdaroglu wins, as he has accused Russia of intervening in the election process and seems unlikely to establish the same personal working relationship that Erdogan has established with Russian President Vladimir Putin, both experts said. The West, on the other hand, favors Kilicdaroglu over Erdogan, Jenkins opined.