Turkey is preparing for tomorrow’s unprecedented second round of elections in which its president will emerge, after the bitter election campaign ended last night, full of promises and curses against the Kurds and Syrian refugees from the two rivals.

In the second round of the contest, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has from the first a lead of almost five points (49.5%) or 2.5 million votes, against his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu (44.5), candidate of a heterogeneous six-party alliance broad spectrum, from the nationalist right to the center-left.

The latest opinion polls – the institutes that conduct them fell far out in the first round – confirm the lead of the head of state, they put him ahead by five points.

Despite this arithmetic, which a priori favors the ruler of the political game in Turkey for the last twenty years, there is still an unknown variable: this is the 8.3 million votes of the citizens who did not express themselves in the first round, although the participation reached 87%.

Already in the Turkish diaspora, whose members had until Tuesday night to vote, turnout was higher (1.9 million against 1.69 million) than in the first round.

Apart from those who chose to abstain, the two camps flirted after May 14 with the ultra-nationalists.

First-round runner-up Sinan Ogan (5% of the vote), a former MHP official, sided with Mr. Erdogan.

The effort to appeal to the far-right vote completely changed the texture of the campaign.

Shocked by an unexpected defeat in the first round, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 74, disappeared from television screens the day after the election to reappear on the fourth day, having reinvented himself as a belligerent candidate.

The smiles and finger hearts at his campaign rallies were replaced by clenched fists and promises that Syrian refugees would be sent back to their homeland “the day after victory”. A threat he repeated a few days later, insisting that Turkey would not turn into a “warehouse of immigrants”.

Then, he somewhat moderated his positions on the Syrians and called on Europe to pay what it promised. “We will fix the situation, you will see,” he told young people.

Turkey, with at least 3.4 million Syrian refugees (according to official data), not counting the hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iranians and Iraqis in its territory, is the host country for most refugees in the world at the moment.

On the other hand, President Erdogan, 69, even more energized after the first-round result, delivered back-to-back speeches – delivering three a day last weekend… – denouncing his “terrorist” opponents, whom he accuses of collaborating with the HDP and “the LGBTQI”, who threaten, as he repeats, the fundamental values ​​of the family. “Yesterday they still loved terrorists,” he quipped in one of his speeches.

Downhill

“I’ve been covering election campaigns for decades, I’ve never seen so much ‘fake news’, such offensive and homophobic statements,” sums up Can Dudar, the former editor-in-chief of the center-left Cumhuriyet newspaper. exiled in Berlin, who says he is saddened that the opposition did not react “in the way it should”, nor “called for a minimum of respect”.

Menderes Çınar, professor of political science at Basket University (Ankara), criticized the opposition, which seemed “unable to present its vision for the future of Turkey” and projected “only the failures of the government and the president.”

But, he added, “even if voters do not agree with some parties in the alliance, they cannot afford not to vote.”

The HDP probably agrees. Despite the repeated attacks it has received, and despite Mr Kilicdaroglu’s late alliance with a small ultra-nationalist, xenophobic faction, the party again on Thursday called on its supporters to vote for the opposition candidate.

And via Twitter yesterday HDP figure Selahattin Demirtas, in prison since 2016, repeated the call from his cell yesterday: “There is no third round in this story! Let’s elect Mr. Kilicdaroglu as president, so that Turkey can breathe. Go to the polls, vote.”

Last night, Mr. Kilicdaroglu accused the authorities of preventing him from sending an SMS with which he wanted to inform journalists that he would be participating in a program of a private television station.

According to him, the obstruction was made “by the Control Authority of Information and Communications Technologies (BTS), on the order of Erdogan”. He added that the president’s people did it “because they are afraid”.

The non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, RSF) criticizes the imbalance in the visibility of the candidates — the head of state monopolizes the television screens.

For Erol Enteroglou, RSF’s representative in Turkey, “the media system that has been created” is itself a means of rigging the elections, as it “deprives” Turkish citizens of democratic dialogue.