"The Syrians will leave," read this week the latest posters of Turkey's opposition presidential candidate, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, conventionally described as a "social democrat." As a reward for his clarity, which is also not unexpected, the leader of the xenophobic Victory Party offered him his support this Wednesday morning in the second round of the Turkish presidential elections.
In a joint press conference, the far-right Ümit Özdag and Kemal Kiliçdaroglu have promised to "return Syrian refugees to Syria within a year." Until now, the Popular Alliance candidate had given himself a two-year term.
The support of the Victory Party, created a few years ago with an anti-immigration program, is a breath of fresh air for the first in elections in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the favourite, after having obtained 49.5% of the vote in the first round, compared to 44.8% for Kiliçdaroglu.
In fact, last Monday the current president obtained the valuable support of the third party in the running, on behalf of the Ancestral Alliance, Sinan Ogan, who had the support of a handful of xenophobic parties in the first round, the most important of which was the Victory Party. Once the alliance was dissolved, this party has decided to distance itself from the advice of Ogan, a character close to Turkish intelligence circles who is not currently a member of any party.
However, the 2.2% of the votes harvested by the Victory Party in the legislative elections held in parallel gives an idea that its support might not be enough to turn around the forecasts, now favorable to a revalidation of Erdogan.
At least 3.5 million Syrians live in Türkiye. Hundreds of thousands of children of Syrian parents have already been born on Turkish soil and are being educated in Turkish. Only a few hundred thousand Syrians have obtained Turkish citizenship, twelve years after the start of the conflict in Syria, but the number is considered excessive by Turkish nationalists, who also see them as a fishing ground for votes for Erdogan's AKP.
However, the "voluntary return" plans of the "Syrian brothers", according to the vocabulary used so far by the leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP), Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, raise many questions. Among them, how many millions, in the event of being legally cornered, will actually return to their towns and cities of origin, where peace awaits them pending the reconstruction of Bashar al-Assad's police regime -which many of them consider little less than a " unfaithful" - and how many will do everything possible and impossible to cross the borders of Greece and Bulgaria, on their way to Europe.
(Kemal Kiliçdaroglu has taken a picture this Wednesday with the xenophobic extreme right -below- in a last desperate attempt to displace Recep Tayyip Erdogan)
