Turkey’s fractious opposition parties united on Monday behind a single candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
If the six-party coalition holds together through the June 18 election, Kilicdaroglu has a real shot at unseating the increasingly authoritarian and Islamist incumbent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kilicdaroglu, 74, is a low-key career civil servant who went right into the Turkish Ministry of Treasury and Finance after graduating from college. He actually won a “Bureaucrat of the Year” award in 1994. He parlayed his reputation as an honest administrator and corruption fighter into a seat in the Turkish parliament in 2002, the same year Erdogan took the top office.
CHP is the party of Turkey’s legendary secular reformer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and Kilicdaroglu is running on a platform of breaking down the authoritarian, nationalist, and Islamist power structure forged by Erdogan, who explicitly despises Ataturk’s vision of limited secular government compatible with Western values.
Turkish army tanks parade in front of a giant banner with a portrait of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, during Victory Day celebrations in Ankara on August 30, 2008. (ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Kilicdaroglu looks quite a bit like India’s revolutionary leader Mahatma Gandhi – a rather more flattering comparison than the individual Erdogan is sometimes teased for resembling – and his supporters applaud the quiet but firm determination he has shown in debates with Erdogan’s fiery nationalist AKP party.
“He is nice and very calm – a little too calm. Kemal never raises his voice, he never shouts. You can’t even have a decent argument with him. The fact that he is so quiet sometimes really drives me crazy,” Kilicdaroglu’s wife Selvi once remarked in an interview.
One of the six parties backing Kilicdaroglu for president, the Good Party, almost dropped out of the coalition because they thought…