By Athena Papakosta

His opponent Recep Tayyip Erdogan is nothing like him. He is low-key, polite and has been in the loser’s position for many years. In short, it is the exact opposite of the current president of Turkey.

He is 74 years old and has been the leader of the People’s Republican Party (CHP) since 2010. He was first elected in 2002 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power for the first time, and he was re-elected to parliament in 2007 and served as the vice-chairman of the CHP Parliamentary Group.

When Deniz Baikal resigned as leader of the People’s Republican Party over a scandal – which erupted when the public saw pink videos of him and his MP wife – the Kilicdaroglu he ran unopposed in the race for the leadership of the party and was elected its president. Since then, however, he has only lost and today he may, for the first time in 13 years, record a significant victory.

Calm power

He was born in 1948 in the city of Tunceli. He is the fourth of seven children in his family. His father was a civil servant and his mother did not work. He is an Alevite, that is, he belongs to an ethnic-religious minority that does not follow the Koran to the letter and combines elements from the Shia and Sufi traditions. As he states, he wants to uproot the old system in Turkey by bringing change. After all, he himself knows very well the structures of the Turkish state since, after graduating from the Ankara Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences, he worked for a number of years in the Turkish State, while he also took over the General Directorate of the Social Insurance Foundation in the mid-1990s. 90.

In his 13 years leading the Republican Party, he managed to change it… quietly. He shuffled his deck by “fishing” for politicians of opposing views and starting points while turning his back on the old militaristic codes of the CHP. He began to build a base promoted by social democratic values ​​but open to alliances which began to prove important for his present.

The Turkish Media has dubbed him “Gandhi” because of his physical resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi.

His associates when they speak of him stand by his kindness. As they explain, he never interrupts his interlocutor, when someone enters the room he gets up from his seat and chooses to shake hands while, in moments of stress and tension, he maintains his composure. An indicative example of the above is the attack he received in 2014 from a man inside the Turkish parliament when he was preparing to address his deputies.

The man punched him twice and trying to restore calm, he emphasized that “the road to democracy has many obstacles”. Accordingly, when in 2019 Turkish nationalists tried to lynch him at a soldier’s funeral, Kemal Kilicdaroglu made it clear that “they cannot stop us”. A few weeks before, the municipal elections had preceded with his candidates, Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, winning the contests in Istanbul and Ankara, depriving the party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of victory in the two largest cities of Turkey.

In 2017, while the Turkish president had launched a witch hunt by prosecuting and imprisoning those he called his enemies, Kilicdaroglu attracted everyone’s attention when he started the “March for Justice” walking for 25 days, together with his followers, from Ankara to Istanbul demanding justice on the occasion of the conviction of CHP MP Enis Berberoglu.

The chosen one of the “Six”

The 74-year-old leader of Turkey’s main opposition has been chosen as the joint presidential candidate of the united opposition in the country. It consists – in addition to the People’s Republican Party – of Meral Aksener of the Good Party (IYI Parti), Temel Karamolaoglu of the Happiness Party (SP), the former deputy prime minister of Turkey, Ali Babacan of the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA ), former Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu from the Future Party (Gelecek Partisi) and Gultekin Wisal from the Democratic Party (DP). At the same time, Kilicdaroglu also enjoys the support of the pro-Kurdish HDP party while strengthening his popularity with the two powerful mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, with 52-year-old Ekrem Imamoglu – mainly – proving to be an ace up his sleeve.

He promises to end Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies, bring the country back into the Western camp, and above all to revise the Constitution and return Turkey to a parliamentary system. He explains that young people want freedom and democracy, calls on the people to trust him that he will be a normal president and forms a heart with his hands in every campaign speech emphasizing that “everything will be fine”.

If he wins, however, he will not have an easy mission. The country is facing serious economic problems and its back is against the wall. At the same time, the Turkish people are deeply divided while their alliance, the Table of Six, as the united opposition is called, came together to oust Erdogan from power but, despite their ideological differences, should remain united. so that the “sultan” does not return stronger to her.

Tension and problems remain for Kilicdaroglu who can claim victory from the first round but the next day in Turkey will be decided by Erdogan’s reaction whether he is on the losing side or on the winning side.