With elections roughly less than five months away, the Turkish opposition procrastinates in announcing their contender against incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As Erdoğan and their supporters remain frustrated with the lack of a candidate, Ali Babacan, head of one of the parties that formed an opposition bloc, hinted he can be nominated.
Babacan, of the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA) reiterated his enthusiasm for grabbing a spot in the presidential race, less than two weeks after his first open discussion of the likelihood of candidacy. “We won’t lose time if one of the party leaders are nominated,” he told a local affiliate of Fox TV on Monday. He was referring to leaders in the so-called “table for six” that brings together six primary opposition parties. The “table for six,” which include the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the closest rival of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), as well as smaller parties like DEVA and the Good Party (IP), formed by former members of current AK Party ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), regularly convenes to discuss their election roadmap. Yet, ahead of elections scheduled for June, they failed to nominate a candidate.
“If this does not happen, we can always agree upon another name. It is not like the end of the world,” Babacan said, adding that any “outsider” would adapt to their “system.”
The DEVA leader, along with Future Party (GP) leader Ahmet Davutoğlu, are under the spotlight more than other members of the bloc for their remarks viewed as controversial nowadays. Davutoğlu has said earlier that they would have a candidate that would act in line with what the opposition bloc’s members instructed, in making decisions for certain assignments. Babacan echoed a similar sentiment. Both leaders stirred up a debate about whether it would be constitutional to have such a "puppet president."
Babacan said although his party is committed to “team play” in its engagement with the opposition bloc, he noted that he was a “scorer,” referring to his former stints helming the Turkish economy and foreign affairs while he was a young minister in AK Party government. “The team will have a captain and we will decide who the captain will be in the coming weeks. It does not matter who it will be but if they ask me, I believe I will be a good captain,” he said.
The opposition bloc includes a former prime minister, a former interior minister and a former mayor, apart from Babacan who held multiple ministerial posts in the past. Nevertheless, it is the CHP, run by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a former bureaucrat who did not hold any political post in any past governments, which garnered the most votes against the AK Party in the past. So far, names of several mayors, including Istanbul's Ekrem Imamoğlu, who hails from the CHP, emerged as a potential candidate against Erdoğan, though the bloc is tight-lipped on whether he would be nominated.
