Addressing an election rally in the southern Turkish province of Antalya on Tuesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hit out at the opposition or “table for six.” He said the table was “expanded to seven,” referring to the endorsement of Green Left Party (YSP), or the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), to his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. “Now they have grown to a table for nine,” Erdoğan said, noting the support of terrorist groups PKK (which is aligned with the HDP) and the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
Erdoğan said the opposition parties ignored the concerns of their conventional voters by aligning with terrorist groups. “They just want Türkiye to stop its progress in defense, diplomacy and other fields, reverting our gains at least half a century back,” he said.
Türkiye achieved progress in cutting off independence abroad from energy to defense under successive governments of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).
The six-party opposition bloc, led by presidential candidate and Republican People's Party (CHP) Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu aims to undo the legacy of Erdoğan and his governments, particularly, the executive presidency system that streamlined bureaucracy. Kılıçdaroğlu, who assembled a ragtag team of opposition parties from the obscure Democrat Party (DP) to the nationalist Good Party (IP), as well as the party of a former prime minister from the AK Party, campaigns for "democratic change" against what he calls the "one-man regime." Instead of an executive presidency, he pledges a new system with an apparently infinite number of men. The bloc already unveiled plans to assign heads of six parties as vice presidents of Kılıçdaroğlu if they win the elections. Kılıçdaroğlu also recently announced that he would have the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, who accompany him to campaign rallies, as his vice presidents after the elections.
The opposition bloc also promises to release prominent names jailed in the past years, although itself claimed Erdoğan or the government intervened in the judicial process for their incarceration. Among those they plan "to release" is Osman Kavala, a businessperson convicted of orchestrating the notorious 2013 Gezi Park riots in Istanbul. They also seek the release of Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who is accused of inciting the 2014 riots that killed dozens of people across Türkiye. The HDP is known for its affiliation with the terrorist group PKK.
“They say they would release Selo,” Erdoğan said in Antalya, referring to the nickname of Demirtaş. “This was what Kılıçdaroğlu’s meeting with HDP earlier was about. But he did not announce it to the public openly,” he said. “On May 14, I believe our nation will put a stop to these lies,” he added.
“This is not the first time we were exposed to this scenario imposed on Türkiye through Kılıçdaroğlu. We’ve seen this all before, when we were subject to coups almost once in every decade, when we were ruled by coalition governments, when we were exposed to ideological infighting, sectarian and ethnic strife. We’ve seen this before when Türkiye failed to progress. But we know who wrote these scenarios, we know its actors,” Erdoğan said, implying foreign powers were endorsing the opposition bloc.
“They want to stir up strife again. They want to hand over the country to terrorist groups controlled by imperialists,” he said.
“If we stopped progress in every field, we wouldn’t be victims of coup attempts, terror attacks and other obstacles. But then, we would not be dignified in the eyes of our people. We did not bow down, we did not submit to the desires of imperialist powers,” he said.
