Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cruises on Sunday into the final week before an historic runoff election as the big favourite to extend two decades of his Islamic-rooted rule until 2028.
\nSecular leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu gave the opposition\u2019s best performance of Erdogan\u2019s dominant era in May 14 parliament and presidential polls.
\nThe retired bureaucrat of Kurdish Alevi descent broke ethnic barriers and Erdogan\u2019s stranglehold on the media and state institutions to win almost 45 per cent of the vote.
\nBut Erdogan still came within a fraction of a point of topping the 50 per cent threshold needed to win in the first round.
\nThe 69-year-old leader did it despite Turkey\u2019s worst economic crisis since the 1990s and opinion surveys showing him headed for his first national election defeat.
\nKilicdaroglu will now need to rally his deflated troops and beat the odds yet again to wrest back power for the secular party that ruled Turkey for most of the 20th century.
\nThe Eurasia Group consultancy put Erdogan\u2019s chances of winning next Sunday at 80 per cent.
\n\u201cIt will be an uphill struggle for Kilicdaroglu in the second round,\u201d Hamish Kinnear of the Verisk Maplecroft consulting firm agreed.
\nMillions of patriots
\nErdogan rode a nationalist wave that saw smaller right-wing parties pick up nearly 25 per cent of the parallel parliamentary vote.
\nKilicdaroglu is courting these voters in the second presidential round. The 74-year-old revamped his campaign team and tore up his old playbook for the most fateful week of his political career.
\nHe has replaced chatty clips that he used to record from his kitchen with desk-thumping speeches and pledges to immediately rid Turkey of millions of migrants.
\n\u201cAs soon as I come to power, I will send all the refugees home,\u201d he said in his first post-election address.
\nHe has chased the endorsement of a little-known ultra-nationalist, whose tiny vote share pushed Turkey into its first presidential runoff.
\nAnd he has punched back against Erdogan\u2019s claims that he was associating with \u201cterrorists\u201d \u2014 a code word for Kurdish groups fighting for broader autonomy in Turkey\u2019s southeast.
\n\u201cWe have millions of patriots to reach,\u201d Kilicdaroglu said.
\nBut Kilicdaroglu\u2019s sharp right turn could prove costly with voters from Kurdish regions that overwhelmingly backed him in the first round.
\nKurds embraced Erdogan during his first decade in power because he worked to lift many of their social restrictions.
\nThey turned against him when Erdogan formed his own alliance with Turkey\u2019s nationalist forces and began to unleash purges after surviving a failed coup attempt in 2016.
\nKilicdaroglu\u2019s new and more overtly nationalist tone echoes a secular era during which Kurds \u2014 who make up nearly a fifth of Turkey\u2019s population \u2014 were stripped of basic rights.
\nSevere currency crisis
\nThe political battles are being accompanied by market turmoil that set in once it became apparent that Erdogan was on course to keep his grip on power.
\nTurkey\u2019s recent years have been roiled by economic upheaval that erased many of the gains of Erdogan\u2019s more prosperous early rule.
\nMost of the problems stem from Erdogan\u2019s fervent fight against interest rates \u2014 an approach some analysts link to his adherence to Islamic rules against usury.
\n\u201cI have a thesis that interest rates and inflation are positively correlated,\u201d he told CNN this week.
\n\u201cThe lower the interest rates, the lower inflation will be.\u201d The markets\u2019 trust in more conventional economics have put massive pressure on the lira.
\nGovernment data showed Turkey\u2019s foreign currency reserves \u2014 topped up by aid from Arab allies \u2014 dropping by $9 billion and reaching their lowest levels in 21 years in the week running up to the first-round vote.
\nAnalysts think most of the money was spent on efforts to prop up the lira against sharp and politically sensitive falls.
\n\u201cThere is now a very real risk that an Erdogan victory could lead to macroeconomic instability in Turkey, including the threat of a severe currency crisis,\u201d Capital Economic warned.
\nSpecial relationship with Putin
\nBut Erdogan has exuded confidence since the first round.
\nHe has ridiculed his rival\u2019s nationalist overtures and stuck by some of his more controversial policies \u2014 including an increasingly strong relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
\nErdogan\u2019s turn towards Russia has helped secure billions of dollars of relief on Turkey\u2019s huge energy bill.
\n\u201cRussia and Turkey need each other in every field possible,\u201d Erdogan told CNN.
\nHe also argued that his more \u201cbalanced\u201d stance towards Putin helped him negotiate a UN-backed deal with Russia under which Ukraine was allowed to resume exporting grain.
\n\u201cThis was possible because of our special relationship with President Putin,\u201d Erdogan said.
\nHe also scoffed at remarks from 2019 by US President Joe Biden \u2014 recalled by Erdogan\u2019s allies throughout the campaign \u2014 calling Erdogan an \u201cautocrat\u201d.
\n\u201cWould a dictator ever enter a runoff election?\u201d Erdogan asked.v<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cruises on Sunday into the final week before an historic runoff election as the big favourite to extend two decades…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6925,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}