During a Wednesday (January 18) address to fellow Justice and Development Party (AKP) members in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan indicated May 14 as a likely date for Turkey’s upcoming presidential elections. Originally scheduled for June 18, 2023, the AKP has shown signs in recent weeks of moving the elections to an earlier date this spring, an action that President Erdoğan may carry out unilaterally despite opposition resistance.
During his address to AKP officials in Ankara, Erdoğan made reference to May 14 as the date when the Democrat Party (DP) came to power in 1950. The DP was Turkey’s first opposition party to win in national elections following the country’s first free and fair polls, which saw the long-ruling Republican People’s Party (CHP) of the country’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk unseated in favor of a center-right party with Islamic sympathies. Although publicly pledging their commitment to Turkey’s Atatürkist secularism and officially disavowing political Islam, the rise of the DP was widely seen as a repudiation of republican Turkey’s strict secularist roots in favor of a conservatism that appealed more to Anatolia’s pious masses. The DP would be unseated in the 1960 military coup, with its leader Adnan Menderes executed under dubious allegations of orchestrating the 1955 Istanbul pogrom against Greek citizens, a charge for which Menderes would be posthumously exonerated. Their 10 years in power and abrupt ousting made the party and Menderes himself symbols of the Islam-inspired conservatism espoused by Erdoğan and the AKP. In his speech yesterday, the president memorialized Menderes’ rise to power while criticizing the opposition, saying:
“73 years later, on the same day, our nation will once again say ‘enough’ to the coup pranksters and incompetent people who call themselves the ‘Table of Six’.” The ‘Table of Six’ is the name given to the electoral alliance of six opposition parties seeking to unseat President Erdoğan. The parties plan to run a joint presidential candidate in the contest, although the name of this candidate has yet to be announced.
One reason to move the election to an earlier date may be Erdoğan’s own eligibility. Turkey’s constitution allows a president to serve two terms in office. While his current term is his first under Turkey’s new presidential system, adopted in 2018, Erdoğan had previously served a term as president under the country’s former parliamentary system, which was scrapped in a controversial and tightly contested referendum in 2017. The Turkish constitution, meanwhile, contains a provision allowing a president to run for a third term, provided that the election has been moved to an earlier date, prior to the expiration of the second term, through parliamentary action. Although possessing the power to unilaterally move the election date himself, the president’s party and coalition partners occupy only 335 seats in parliament, just short of the 360 votes needed to make such a change. Turkish constitutional legal experts are split on the issue of the president’s current eligibility, while Speaker of Parliament Mustafa Şentop, a member of Erdoğan’s AKP, has argued that because his first presidential term occurred under the previous system, the president is free to run for another term.
In addition to the issue of President Erdoğan’s eligibility, the AKP has argued that interference with Kurban Bayramı (Feast of the Sacrifice), university exams, and ‘seasonal considerations’ as reasons for shifting the contest to an earlier date.
Opposition figures issued various responses on Wednesday evening to the president’s announcement. Gültekin Uysal, the chairman of the Democrat Party which was reestablished in 2007, disavowed Erdoğan’s references to Adnan Menderes and the party’s 1950 election victory, saying “On May 14 we will be here once again in order to say ‘enough’ to this one-man rejime and its corruption, poverty, and restrictions!”
Meral Akşener, leader of the İYİ Party and member of the Table of Six opposition coalition, released a post on social media saying “May will be ours!” CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, seen by many as the likely opposition candidate, said at a meeting in the southeastern city of Gaziantep “The polls will come; on May 14 there will be an election. We will go to the polls and with God’s help we will create a beautiful new beginning.”
