On March 10th, Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for new presidential elections for May 14th, an announcement he made more than a month after the catastrophic earthquake that struck the country and neighboring Syria. In this context, his main rival for the next elections has emerged from the opposition: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kılıçdaroğlu was chosen in the midst of high tensions within the so-called “Table of Six”, formed by the six Turkish opposition parties. Disputes within the coalition over the choice of its presidential candidate were such that there was even speculation that the anti-Erdoğan pact would be broken, under the threat of abandonment by the leader of the right-wing nationalist party, Meral Aksener.
The opposition managed to reach a consensus, and presented Kılıçdaroğlu as its representative and Erdogan’s main rival for the May elections, who also positions himself as the polar opposite of the current president.
Kılıçdaroğlu has stated that he can make all the necessary legal changes to the visa exemption for Turkish nationals wanting to travel to Europe in one quarter. “We will come to power and we will win the presidency,” he said in a television interview on Habertürk TV. “We will solve the visa problems.”
Türkiye and the EU began a dialogue on visa liberalization in 2013 after Ankara signed a readmission agreement that allowed EU countries to send back illegal migrants entering their territory from Türkiye. In 2016, as part of a migrant agreement, the EU had promised to grant visa-free travel to Turkish nationals in the Schengen area. Türkiye, however, has not met 5 of the 72 benchmarks to achieve this goal.
Within three months, our citizens will be able to enter Europe without visas.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu
The remaining benchmarks include legislative changes on anti-corruption, conclusion of an operational cooperation agreement with Europol, updating of personal data protection legislation, revision of terrorism legislation in line with EU standards, as well as judicial cooperation with EU member states.
Kılıçdaroğlu was born in 1948, in a village in the Tunceli region, from an Alevi family, an ethno-religious Islamic group in Türkiye. He began working as a consultant at the Ministry of Finance in 1971, and decades later became director of the Social Security Agency in 1992. He retired eight years later.
At the beginning of the new century, a report on corruption led him to join the CHP, where he managed to climb the ladder to become vice president of the party in 2007. At that time, he gained considerable fame for revealing corruption cases within the country, some of which involved members of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Following his run for mayor of Istanbul and his subsequent defeat to an AKP member, Kilicdaroglu took over as the new leader of the CHP, replacing Deniz Baykal, who left the party after a scandal affected his political career. Kilicdaroglu drew attention in 2017, when he and his supporters walked 420 km on foot from Ankara to Istanbul over 25 days.
The so-called “March for Justice” was held as a form of protest against the authoritarianism of Erdogan and his government, linked to the criminal case against Enis Berberoglu, a journalist and CHP activist, arrested for disclosing private images of the Turkish secret services.
