On Sunday, June 24, Turkey holds presidential and parliamentary elections in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to achieve his holy grail: one-man rule legitimized in elections, after narrowly winning last year's referendum to replace the parliamentary system with an executive presidency in Russian style.
If Erdogan wins, the prime ministership disappears and he will dominate the legislature, the judiciary and the executive branch. This neo-Islamist leader seeks to overshadow Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic and its secular giant of the previous century, writes the Financial Times.
"However, what should have been a run-in to his twelfth straight victory since 2002 has turned into an uncertain turn. The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is beginning to show signs of wear and tear, as is its leader. "Erdogan is still likely to win. He is close - but not quite - impregnable, and this will not be a fair contest," the London business daily wrote.
Turkey remains under a state of emergency since a failed coup in mid-2016, the paper concluded, and Erdogan has not only cracked down on supporters of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based imam and former AKP ally whom he accused of orchestrating the coup, the government filled prisons with dissidents and opponents.
The man who could bring down Erdogan
Something is changing in Turkey. After sixteen years of President Erdogan's electoral dominance, the secular opposition Republican People's Party, known as the CHP, has found a leader and presidential candidate who is disrupting Erdogan, emboldening opposition voters and reaching out to Turks beyond his party's traditional base, writes former member of the Turkish parliament Şafak Pavey for The New York Times.
Murmurs are growing that Erdogan may not be invincible when Turkey votes on June 24. The politician who achieved this transformation in the national mood is Muharem Ince, a 54-year-old member of parliament from the CHP, who was chosen as the presidential candidate in May.
Ince has represented Yalova, a province about 50 miles from Istanbul, in the Turkish parliament since 2002. His father was a small farmer. Ince taught physics at school before entering politics.
He asks the Turkish people to choose between freedom and fear, between national prestige and national loneliness, between the imposition of religious practice and freedom of choice, between openness and xenophobia, writes the New York newspaper.
Pavej adds that Turks seem to accept his slogan "Peacemaking, growth and joint action", and independent polls show that support for Ince has already risen to 30 percent.
"With the opposition parties in agreement, Mr. Erdogan's time may finally be up. But no one knows which rabbit Erdogan and his team will pull out of the hat the day before the election," Pavey concludes in an article for The Times.
'Mother Meral': The woman trying to oust Erdogan from office
Before the Turkish elections, the American network CNN pays special attention to Meral Akşener, the president of the Iji party (Good Party), and at the beginning of the text it states that according to Turkish tradition, disputes between men end when the woman throws her headscarf on the ground.
"Presidential candidate Aksener goes from town to town collecting these colorful fabrics, known as 'scarves' from her supporters," CNN explains, saying that if she wins the scarves will be displayed in an exhibition at Cankaya, the former presidential palace in Ankara.
CNN also says that some people abroad call Aksener the Turkish Lady of Steel, and at home they call her Asena, the mythological she-wolf woman who defended the Turkish tribes from danger.
"Some people call me sister, but there are many young people who call me 'Mother Meral,' and I love being a mother," said Aksener, who is the only female candidate in the June 24 election.
CNN adds that Iji is a new party on the political scene, but Aksener is a veteran in politics, as she served as interior minister for eight months, when the dirty war against Kurdish separatists was at its peak and the wave of human rights violations in Turkey was spreading.
When she was questioned about these allegations, Aksener rebelled, claiming that there were no violations of human rights by the government while she was a minister, writes the American network, and recalls that Aksener, like all opposition candidates, promised to change the Turkish political system to the situation before the changes that Erdogan voted for last year in a referendum.
Turkish election diversion
Forin polisi (Foreign policy) assesses that President Truska is facing the biggest wave of opposition since his first election victory in 2002.
Erdogan, less than a week before the election, has again taken an interest in draining the "swamp of terrorists" in northern Iraq, says a political magazine.
"It comes at a strange moment and a decade late. Erdogan, who has turned a blind eye to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) camps in the Qandil mountains for years, is now opening the show by attacking them."
Forin Polisi also reports data from a recent survey by one of Turkey's leading public opinion polling agencies, according to which 51 percent of respondents see the economy as their main concern, and security is far below with only 13,4 percent.
The text pays special attention to the influence of America, where it is stated that in Syria, the Kurds led Washington's fight against the Islamic State.
Forin Polisi says that if Erdogan was serious about his attacks on the PKK, he would have hit their allies in their Syrian territories east of the Euphrates River.
"Instead, he is bombing the barren mountains as long as he is convinced that the news of the attack on Qandil, synonymous with the PKK, is spreading. This is because the success he is looking for is political, not military. Erdogan cares far more about winning at the ballot box than battlefield."
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