The re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as president of Turkey seems even more likely after yesterday he received the explicit support of Sinan Ogan, the far-right candidate eliminated two Sundays ago. "I ask the voters who voted for us in the first round to vote for Erdogan in the second," he said.
In the long televised statement, Ogan based his election on the need to guarantee "stability", since the future Parliament will have a clear pro-Erdogan majority.
The current Turkish president will face opposition leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on Sunday, who won 2.5 million votes less in the first round. Erdogan, with 49.52% of the vote, was less than half a point away from automatic re-election. With the same participation, a minimum of 5.2% of the votes obtained by Sinan Ogan would be enough to cross the threshold.
Ogan, an ultra-nationalist politician who is currently not a member of any party, got a better-than-expected result, boosted by the Ancestral Alliance (ATA), a platform of small xenophobic, ultra-right forces.
The desire to get these votes made Kilicdaroglu face immigration last week, when he came out with "ten million refugees in Turkey, which will soon become thirty million". Before the elections, the social democratic candidate had already promised to return the Syrian refugees to their country "within two years".
But ultimately, for the Turkish far-right, the evidence that Kiliçdaroglu's appreciable result was owed to the voting instructions of the HDP, the political front of the Kurdish movement, weighed more heavily. It is not clear what Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have promised Ogan in exchange for asking for the vote for him. Last week, Ogan had demanded a vice-presidency from the two bidders, in addition to an unacceptable condition for Kiliçdaroglu, such as the renunciation of the support of the pro-Kurdish HDP.
Erdogan and Ogan could have reached the current pact in Friday's interview, even if the latter waited for the Greek elections to be announced.
Sinan Ogan served in the far-right MHP (now a partner of Erdogan) before being expelled. Of Azeri origin, he is a man well connected to Turkish intelligence and an expert in the geopolitics of the Black Sea and Azerbaijan, where he worked. Ogan, who studied in Moscow, has written about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and speaks Russian as well as English. The "stability" he speaks of could include maintaining Turkey's active neutrality.
