Turkey’s Erdogan calls opponent a ‘drunk’ as tight election looms
- Turkey’s president stepped up his rhetoric against opponents a week before what is expected to be a tight election
- Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade rule could hang in the balance, with latest polls suggesting the vote may go to a run-off
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu a “drunk” during his campaign’s largest rally ahead next Sunday’s election – the toughest of his two-decade rule.
Addressing a sea of supporters in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan said Kilicdaroglu could drink as much as he wanted, but the people would not abandon the country to a “drunkard”.
The 69-year-old Turkish president also once again accused his challenger of working with “terrorists”.
Erdogan gave the number of participants gathered on the tarmac of Istanbul’s old Ataturk airport as 1.7 million.
There was no official estimate on the number of participants, but Erdogan and his party chartered 10,000 buses to bring in people from 39 provinces.
The latest polls suggest that Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu are locked in a dead heat and probably heading to a run-off on May 28. Erdogan’s popularity has been hit by a cost-of-living crisis driven by runaway inflation.
But surveys in Turkey are an inexact science and both are trying to show their supporters that they can win outright next weekend by picking up more than 50 per cent of the vote.
Kilicdaroglu staged a smaller but still-impressive rally that filled a park on the Asian side of the city facing the Sea of Marmara the day before.
“Are you ready for change? Are you ready to restore democracy?” the 74-year-old head of Turkey’s oldest party asked his supporters.
“Together, we will rule the country with reason and virtue,” he said.
Elsewhere on Sunday, protesters threw stones at Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), during an election rally in the eastern city of Erzurum, a stronghold of Erdogan’s AK Party (AKP).
Imamoglu, who would become vice-president if Kilicdaroglu wins the election, later claimed nine people had been injured at the event.
At his rally, the Turkish president appealed to his conservative Muslim voter base.
“AK Party and other parties in our alliance would never be pro-LGBT, because family is sacred to us. We will bury those pro-LGBT in the ballot box,” he told the crowd.
Erdogan has toughened his rhetoric against the LGBT community in recent years, frequently labelling members “deviants”.
Erdogan has accused Kilicdaroglu of getting support from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency since the 1980s in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.
It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The opposition has previously denounced claims by Erdogan linking them to terrorists as divisive and dangerous campaign rhetoric
dpa, Reuters and Agence France-Presse
