After months of debate, Turkish opposition parties have named veteran Social Democrat leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu as their candidate for the May 14 presidential election, in which he will face President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"Kemal Kilicdaroglu is our presidential candidate," Temel Karamollaoglu, leader of the Happiness Party, told a crowd outside his party headquarters in Ankara.
Six opposition parties, which decided to form an alliance for the presidential election, held a meeting on Monday in the Turkish capital.
The presidential and legislative elections will take place on the scheduled date, May 14, despite the earthquake on February 6 that left more than 46,000 dead in the country and devastated entire areas of the south of the country.
Kiliçdaroglu, leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP, Social Democrat), will be the candidate of the opposition alliance against an Erdogan who has been in power for twenty years.
"All together, we will establish the power of morality and justice," Kiliçdaroglu declared shortly after the announcement was made.
Some of the opposition had criticized Kiliçdaroglu, a 74-year-old former senior official, for his lack of charisma in the face of President Erdogan, his own succession candidate.
Erdogan, whose popularity has suffered due to the economic crisis that the country is going through, will have to answer to the voters for the slowness of the rescue teams in the hours after the earthquake on February 6.
Deficiencies that Kiliçdaroglu himself highlighted, to denounce the "incompetence" and corruption in the country.
Erdogan, 69, apologized for the delay in the arrival of the relief teams, and has made the reconstruction of the devastated areas the main line of his future policy, with the promise of building nearly half a million homes " a year from now" in accordance with anti-seismic standards.
According to polls, the May 14 presidential election is heralded as the toughest election for Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, the year he came to power as prime minister.
Erdogan and his party, the AKP, of an Islamist nature, already lost the mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara in 2019 to the benefit of the CHP.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
