Turkey will get a president in the second round of elections on May 28 - that date will mark either the continuation of the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan or the promotion of the opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu as the new leader of this country.
According to the latest data from the Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey, after 99 percent of the votes were counted, Erdogan won 49,9 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections, Kilicdaroglu 44,96 percent, while 5,2 percent of the Turkish population voted for Sinan Ogan.
Erdogan immediately declared that he has 2,6 million votes ahead of his main rival, so it seems that the key for the second round of the election will be who Ogan will support, who won a little more than 2,8 million votes yesterday.
This academician of Azerbaijani-Turkish roots neither before the election nor immediately after the first round did not specify which of the two candidates he would support in the second round.
"I will talk to the leaders in my alliance, I will go and ask my voters in the next few days. And then we will make a decision and do our duty in the next 14 days," Ogan said.
Who is Sinan Ogan?
TRT Balkan states that he is a Turkish nationalist, a former member of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), an ally of the AK Party led by Erdogan.
He was initially on good terms with Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the MHP, but after Bahceli adopted a new policy of supporting Erdogan's policies after the November 2015 elections, Ogan joined other nationalist figures in opposition to his leadership.
Bahceli and Erdogan were not in a political alliance before 2015, but after the AK Party won elections in November following the collapse of Turkey's dissolution process, which Bahceli fiercely opposed, a growing alliance developed between Bahceli's MHP, which was at the center of Turkish nationalism for more than five decades, and Erdogan - an influential conservative leader.
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However, some nationalist politicians such as Ogan, but also Meral Aksener, Umit Ozdag and Koraj Aydin - all members of the MHP before launching their own political platforms - opposed Bahceli's alliance with Erdogan. Eventually, these politicians emerged as an opposing bloc to Bahxeli's long-standing leadership.
After unsuccessful attempts to remove Bahceli as the head of the party, Aksener and her supporters broke away from the MHP and founded the IYI party in 2017.
Ogan remained in the MHP despite being expelled twice for alleged anti-party activities. However, in the critical 2017 referendum vote to change Turkey's parliamentary system to a presidential model, Ogan opposed the MHP's decision to support a "no" vote, as did Aksener and other opponents of Bahceli.
Since 2017, Ogan has not been affiliated with any party, and in this election he ran as an independent even though the ATA alliance led by Ozdag proposed him as its presidential candidate.
Ogan graduated from Marmara University with a degree in Business Administration in 1989. From the same university, he received a Master's degree in Financial Law/Banking in 1992. He received a PhD from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in 2009.
Between 1992 and 2000, he worked as a lecturer at the Azerbaijan Foundation for Turkish World Studies, according to his website. In the same period, he also managed the Azerbaijan office of the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), a state institution.
In the 2000s, he worked for the Eurasian Center for Strategic Studies (ASAM), leading the think tank's Russia and Ukraine department. In 2004, he founded his research center TURKSAM (Turkiye Strategic Analyzes Centre), which continues to operate.
After becoming a representative of the MHP in 2011, he was a member of the Turkey-Albania and Turkey-Nigeria parliamentary friendship groups. During his tenure, Ogan was also the Secretary General of the Turkish-Azerbaijani Parliamentary Friendship Group.
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