Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kemal Kiliçdaroglu star this Sunday in the electrifying final duel of the Turkish presidential elections. Sixty million voters choose between two different paths, with consequences for the world order.
Despite which, in a conservative country, both rivals intend to embody continuity in their own way. The first option would give the current president a second and last term - under the new Constitution - to mark an era. 25 years at the helm.
In turn, Kiliçdaroglu, as head of the Republican People's Party (CHP), intends to connect with the secularist and nationalist legacy of General Atatürk and with the traditional alignment with Washington. All this with touches of social democrats and liberals and, lately, some xenophobic gesture.
Kiliçdaroglu even quietly salvages the first decade of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), by surrounding himself with ministers from then, who aspire to repeat. Erdogan, 69 years old -five years less- starts with the peace of mind of having obtained 2.5 million votes from Kiliçdaroglu in the first round, when he was a few hundred thousand votes away from automatically becoming president.
Likewise, the AKP will control parliament with its current MHP partners, with the possibility of future fishing in the waters of a rival alliance too heterogeneous to survive in the open.
After four days of silence, when very optimistic polls were not confirmed, Kiliçdaroglu returned to the ring, redoubling his anti-immigration credentials. That did not prevent ultranationalist candidate Sinan Ogan, who had garnered 5.2% of the vote, from recommending voting for Erdogan. But he did manage to close an agreement with the xenophobic Victory Party - which had supported Ogan - for the repatriation of millions of Syrian refugees in one year.
“Syrians will leave”, read the new signs in Kiliçdaroglu. The opposition chief has also pledged to maintain the current policy of disqualifying HDP mayors accused of links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Even so, the leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, has again asked from his cell for the vote for Kiliçdaroglu, his trump card for his release. However, a demobilization of the Kurdish leftist electorate is not ruled out, which would be fatal.
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu has had to fight against a sixty times greater exposure of Erdogan on the air. In addition to the partisan use of state resources. He also complains that the telephone companies yesterday blocked the massive dissemination of the SMS in which he promised to pay the interest on credit card defaults. However, his courtship of the far right has dented his Social Democratic credentials.
"They have turned Turkey into a repository for immigrants," cries the candidate, in a hurry to make peace with Bashar al-Assad, a step prior to the repatriations. Erdogan, on the other hand, seeks gradual exits, ones that do not ruin his reputation in the Sunni world. In a campaign full of backstabbing, what stands out is the dissemination at Erdogan rallies of a crude montage in which the PKK terrorist leadership pronounces itself against the AKP and in favor of “change”.
The fact is that since the end of the fighting in Syria, the voices in favor of the return of the 3.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey have intensified. The deprivation of millions of Turks after the earthquake has added to the pressure. Aksaray, in Istanbul, is one of those neighborhoods "that no longer look Turkish." Although many Syrians and Afghans are not even seen because they are working in textile basements in other peripheral neighborhoods such as Bagcilar.
There is a large floating population, waiting for some mafia to pass them to Europe. Syrians, Afghans, sub-Saharans, North Africans and increasingly Iraqis. A few steps from a Somali barbershop, a sidewalk stall sells used pairs of shoes. The “third globalization” of the historic Fatih district, which is also a re-Islamization, extends to neighboring areas. This is not the kind of cosmopolitanism - the Indonesian restaurant is closed on Fridays - that many middle-class youths expected. They are migrating to more tolerant neighborhoods on the Asian shore, when they cannot make it to the West.
"Either we close the doors to hell or we open a new phase of struggle in a darker Turkey, with more oppression, poverty and pain," the writer Burhan Sönmez, later president of Pen International, confesses to La Vanguardia.
At a CHP post, Duygu, a cook who was born the year Erdogan came to power and who will be voting for the first time, blames him "for injustice and division." The AKP's pounding campaign song plays in the background: “It is the voice of the oppressed, the free voice of the voiceless world, Reeecep Tayyip Erdogan, the nightmare of tyrants, Reeecep Tayip Erdogan.”
"He is a strong man," sums up while Beyda, veiled, beautiful and raised in Germany, shakes. In contrast, Vakifbank has just won the European Championship against another team of Turkish volleyball players in shorts. A tourist, Valerie, provides perspective: "This animation and this coexistence of extremes in France is already impossible."
