Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday says he will accept Sunday’s vote results and step down if he loses, refuting concerns that he may not leave power.
Erdoğan gave assurance in reaction to the question whether he will cling to power if he loses.
“A very ridiculous question … We come to power through democratic means in Turkey … If our nation decides otherwise, I will do what democracy requires, there is nothing else to do,’’ he added.
Erdoğan said his bloc will respect “any results coming out of the ballot box,’’ even as he advised the opposition to deploy people to monitor the election.
If the opposition is concerned about electoral safety, they should monitor all polling stations and “ensure safety’’ just as Erdoğan’s party members do, he said.
“The will of the nation cannot be compromised,’’ Erdoğan added.
The Turkish President believes that he will be re-elected for another term as well as secure parliamentary majority on Sunday.
After 20 years at the helm of Turkey, Erdoğan faces his toughest election test amid public resentment over economic troubles, and the handling of February earthquakes and about 3.5 million Syrian refugees.
A united opposition candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, is polling slightly ahead as analysts believe that Erdogan is facing the greatest hurdle in his political life after two decades in power, having served as Turkey’s prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and president from 2014 onward.
He came to prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, and was celebrated in the first decade of the new millennium for transforming Turkey’s economy into an emerging market powerhouse.
But recent years have been far less rosy for the religiously conservative leader, whose own economic policies have triggered a cost-of-living crisis. Tensions between Turkey and the West frequently spike, and international and domestic voices alike sound the alarm that Turkey’s democracy is looking less democratic by the day.
“Under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey has provided arguably the most vivid template of how a state with plausible, functioning institutions and relatively effective rule of law can be subsumed under the will of first a ruling party and ultimately a single individual,” Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told CNBC.
The frequent arrests of journalists, forced closures of many independent media outlets and heavy crackdowns on past protest movements — as well as a 2017 constitutional referendum that vastly expanded Erdogan’s presidential powers — signal what many say is a slide toward autocracy.
Now, given a recent downturn in support for Erdogan, some fear he may play dirty to ensure his hold on power. His top competition is opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the center-left Republican People’s Party who is running as a unity candidate representing six different parties that all want to see Erdogan out of power.
