On the eve of a crucial presidential vote, Turkey’s outgoing president Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to rally his followers in Istanbul by ending the day with a prayer at the Hagia Sophia, which he has since 2020 turned into glass.

By praying to Hagia Sophia, he will complete an election campaign full of insults and ill-concealed threats, formulated by himself or his entourage, against his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

“The whole West had gone mad! But I did it!” he boasted, referring to the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

Erdogan, in power since 2003, vowed yesterday to respect the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections, which involved 64 million voters, calling the question “absolute stupidity”.

“We came to power through the democratic way, with the support of our people: if our country takes a different decision, we will do what democracy demands. There is nothing else to do,” he said visibly angry during a televised interview that was broadcast simultaneously by most Turkish television networks.

However, fears of violence remain in Turkey’s major cities after a series of incidents in the final days of a highly polarized election campaign forced Turkish opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu to wear a bulletproof vest during the final rallies.

Kilicdaroglu in Atatürk’s mausoleum

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has returned to Ankara, will conclude his campaign today with a symbolic visit to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Ekrem Imamoglu, who is facing a jail sentence he has appealed, will spend the last day of campaigning in Turkey’s financial capital, which elected him mayor in 2019.

In contrast to the authoritarian “one-man principle” embodied by Erdogan, his 74-year-old opponent proposes a collective leadership in the event of his victory, surrounded by vice-presidents who will represent the six political parties of the opposition coalition he leads and covers a wide political spectrum starting from the nationalist right and reaching the liberal left.

“Are you ready for democracy in this country? To bring peace back to the country. I am. I promise you,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu during his last major rally.

“I promise you” is after all the central slogan of his campaign, the refrain of his supporters’ songs: return to the rule of law and the parliamentary state, the separation of powers, the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners, politicians, judges, intellectuals, military and civil servants, imprisoned for “terrorism” and “insulting the president”.

The authoritarian drift of the last decade of Erdogan’s leadership, which intensified further after the failed coup of 2016, an economy in perpetual crisis with the Turkish lira sinking and inflation at 40% on an annual basis, according to disputed official figures, have taken a toll the prestige and popularity of Turkey’s strongman, who boasts of his government’s achievements but admits he is struggling to win over young people, 5.2 million of whom are voting for the first time. An unknown factor in the vote remains the impact of the earthquake that devastated much of southern Turkey, leaving behind ruins, 50,000 dead and a huge number of missing.