Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu gather their supporters before the Turkish elections | Election News

Incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu rallied their supporters on the final day of campaigning before Sunday’s decisive run-off presidential election.

Both candidates are aiming to attract some 8 million voters who did not turn out to vote in the first round.

A first round of voting on May 14 showed Erdogan ahead of oppositions Kemal Kilicdaroglu, and the Erdogans AK party and its allies secured a parliamentary majority in the initial vote.

Erdogan paid tribute to his conservative predecessor by visiting the Adnan Menderes mausoleum in Istanbul on Saturday, to rally his conservative base.

Menderes was tried and hanged a year after the military staged a coup in 1960 to put Turkey back on a more secular path. Erdogan survived an attempted coup against his own Islamic-based government in 2016.

The era of coups and juntas is over, the 69-year-old said after laying a wreath at his mentor’s grave.

I ask you once again to go to the polls. Tomorrow is a special day for all of us.

Erdogan told supporters in January that he wanted to continue Menderess’ fight for religious rights and nationalist causes in the officially secular but predominantly Muslim republic of 85 million.

Erdogan beat Kilicdaroglu by nearly five percentage points in the first round of voting.

But Erdogan’s failure to clear the 50% threshold set the Turks up for the first run-off on Sunday and underscored his gradual decline in support. Erdogan, who has ruled the country for 20 years, is still considered the favourite. Recent opinion polls suggest a close race.

Al Jazeeras Resul Serdar, reporting from Ankara, said Erdogan’s message had not changed significantly since the first round of elections.

He promised to make the next century the century of Turkey. He told voters that he would go ahead with the mega project and strengthen the defense industry in the country. It promised a stronger and more assertive Turkey on the international stage, he said.

Kilicdaroglu, who leads an opposition coalition of conservatives, secular parties and nationalists, ended his campaign with a speech at the family support assurance meeting in the capital, Ankara.

Kilicdaroglu has focused on more immediate issues as he tries to come back from behind. In an attempt to win over nationalist voters, the opposition challenger has vowed to deport Syrian refugees.

To attract the nationalist vote, Kilicdaroglu focused on anti-refugee sentiments in the country and he promised to send millions of Syrian, Afghan and Pakistani refugees back to their country. For now, the opposition is trying to appeal to the nationalists, Al Jazeeras Serdar said.

On Friday, Kilicdaroglu used a late-night TV interview to accuse Erdogan’s government of unfairly blocking his mass text messages to voters.

They are afraid of us, says the 74-year-old former civil servant.

He repeated the same claim on Saturday.

I cannot text journalists to announce our campaign program. Telecom companies prevent me from texting journalists. I am in total blackout. We cannot even hold elections in Türkiye. That man [Erdogan] is a coward, he is a coward, he said.

Observers said Turks’ votes are free from interference on election days, but unfair as the odds are stacked against the opposition in advance.

The elections were competitive but still limited, the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) election observation missions, Michael Georg Link, said after the first round.

The criminalization of certain political forces has prevented full political pluralism and hampered the right of individuals to stand for election, Link said.

Erdogan’s consolidation of power included an almost complete monopolization of the media by the government and its business allies.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimated that Erdogan received 60 times more airtime on the public channel TRT Haber than Kilicdaroglu in April.

They took control of all institutions, Kilicdaroglu said in his TV interview.

Many issues have turned voters for or against Erdogan: while his first decade in office was marked by strong economic growth and warm relations with Western powers, his second began with a corruption scandal and quickly degenerated into political repression and years of economic turmoil that erased many of the early gains.

Another issue that took center stage in the run-up to the election was the state of the economy, growing concern over the fate of Turkey’s beleaguered lira and the stability of its banks.

Erdogan forced the central bank to follow through on his unconventional theory that lower interest rates lower inflation, but Turkey’s annual inflation rate hit 85% last year as the read went into a brief freefall.

Economists believe that the Erdogan government will have to reverse the trend and raise rates sharply or stop supporting the lira if it wants to avoid a full-fledged crisis after the vote.