Ahead of Sunday’s runoff, Erdogan gets ‘kingmaker’ Sinan Ogan’s support

Ahead of Sunday’s runoff, Erdogan gets ‘kingmaker’ Sinan Ogan’s support
Women sit at a stall in front of a campaign truck bearing a portrait of Turkish President and candidate for his reelection Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul on May 22, 2023, ahead of on May 28 Turkiye’s presidential run-off. (AFP)
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Updated 23 May 2023
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Ahead of Sunday’s runoff, Erdogan gets ‘kingmaker’ Sinan Ogan’s support

Ahead of Sunday’s runoff, Erdogan gets ‘kingmaker’ Sinan Ogan’s support
  • Ultranationalist, anti-refugee Ogan won 5.2 percent in May 14 vote
  • ‘Opposition in disarray, but uncertainty remains over outcome’

ANKARA: With neither presidential candidate passing the 50 percent threshold needed for an outright win, Turkiye’s voters head for a second round on Sunday to decide who will be their next leader.
In the first round, incumbent 69-year-old President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gained around 2.5 million more votes than his 74-year-old rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu. However, Erdogan’s 49.5 percent of the votes was not enough for an outright victory against Kilicdaroglu’s 44.9 percent.
In the first round, 54 million people cast their votes, among them 5 million first-time voters. The turnout for the presidential elections in the first round was the highest in the country’s history, at 87 percent.
The ruling government coalition, the Justice and Development Party and its nationalist and Islamist allies, secured a majority in parliament.
After failing to grasp a parliamentary majority, the center-left, pro-secular opposition, with a new campaign slogan “Decide for Turkiye,” now face a serious challenge in delivering on their pledge to gain the presidency.
After his first-round loss, the opposition’s joint presidential candidate Kilicdaroglu repeated his earlier promises to repatriate all refugees within two years and to reduce Turkiye’s dependence on Russia.
Kilicdaroglu also adopted a more aggressive and nationalistic tone, claiming Erdogan had purposely allowed the entry of 10 million refugees into the country and that millions more may come if Erdogan wins another term.
Kilicdaroglu also accused Russia of meddling in Turkiye’s elections with deepfake content, montages and conspiracies.
Meanwhile, both candidates tried to lure voters from Sinan Ogan, 55, the ultranationalist and anti-refugee third candidate, who won 5.2 percent in the May 14 vote although being a little-known fringe politician. But now potential kingmaker Ogan has announced his support for the Erdogan-led ruling coalition for the runoff.
During an interview with the state-run TRT channel on Monday, Erdogan thanked Ogan for his support. He said Ogan “knows very well our stance on fighting terrorism, relations with the Turkic world and the survival of our country.”
Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy was supported by the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or the HDP, particularly in the country’s southeast. Therefore any alliance with Ogan, a vocal Turkish nationalist, could bear the risk of alienating the Kurdish voters who voted for Kilicdaroglu because Ogan explicitly made clear his objection to giving any concessions to the HDP.
The big question now is how Ogan’s presence in the ruling government coalition will influence the voting of about 167,000 eligible Syrian nationals. This is because Ogan insists on a timetable for the repatriation of some 3.7 million Syrian refugees.
Speaking to TRT, Erdogan announced that 450,000 Syrian refugees had returned home after the provision of houses by Turkiye in Syria, and added that the government was planning to send back another 1 million.
Still, nothing is cast in stone and the current political picture is full of uncertainties, particularly with the potential impact of young voters and 8.3 million undecided Turks who abstained from voting in the first round.

The parliamentary majority of the ruling government, however, increases Erdogan’s likelihood of reelection for the presidency as voters are likely to vote for him to avoid a split government, analysts say. This is because a Kilicdaroglu win in the runoff would see him have trouble getting his policies passed through parliament.
Bidding for a third five-year term, Erdogan’s control of state institutions and much of the news media, where he labeled the opposition as a supporter of “terror groups” with alleged fabricated videos, has made Kilicdaroglu’s efforts to convince voters much more difficult while retaining his current electoral base.
Meanwhile, there are already worrying signs that the economic crisis might worsen after the elections with a rise in the selloff of Turkish assets. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development recently reduced its 2023 growth forecast for Turkiye from 3 percent to 2.5 percent.
Daron Acemoglu, a well-known Turkish economic professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has warned that Turkiye could only address the current crisis by either returning to orthodox policies or imposing tight capital controls.
For Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund, Ogan’s potential to persuade those who voted for him in the first round of the presidential election to vote either for Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu is exaggerated.
“His voters were not uniform. Some were secular nationalists who did not want to vote for Erdogan. Others were opposition supporters who did not want to vote for Kilicdaroglu. In either case, Ogan was a ‘placeholder’ and not the primary factor driving voter behavior,” he told Arab News.
Despite Ogan’s support, it is still uncertain whether all of his supporters would vote for Erdogan because Ogan’s “Ancestral Alliance,” a grouping of the Victory Party, Justice Party and two other small nationalist parties, has already splintered.
Victory Party chairman Umit Ozdag, known for his harsh anti-refugee discourse, will announce his position soon, while another coalition partner of Ogan, Justice Party Chairman Vecdet Oz, has already announced his support for Kilicdaroglu.
For Unluhisarcikli, it is likely that the fringe political parties that supported Ogan will endorse Kilicdaroglu, which would do more than counterbalance Ogan’s decision.
“Finally, Ogan’s first-round voters still have an easy third choice besides voting for either of the presidential candidates. They could just stay home,” he said.
As Ogan’s supporters are mostly known for their dislike of both presidential candidates, many of these protest voters could decide simply not to vote in the second round.
Atila Kaya, a former nationalist lawmaker who backed Ogan’s candidacy in the first round, condemned his decision to support the ruling coalition, in a tweet: “If you expect that you can design the future you desire from the will of ‘one man,’ it means you have never been familiar with the tradition you are trying to articulate with!”
On Wednesday night, Kilicdaroglu’s interview on Babala TV, a YouTube talk show channel featuring impassioned interviews with political leaders and attracting millions of views, will be broadcast.
His performance, where he will be asked questions by a young and critical audience mostly picked from the ruling government’s voters, is expected to influence the deep-rooted prejudices against him on a range of issues and to convince undecided voters to a certain extent.
 


Children of Iran Nobel Peace Prize winner fear they won’t see her again

Children of Iran Nobel Peace Prize winner fear they won’t see her again
Updated 7 min 10 sec ago
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Children of Iran Nobel Peace Prize winner fear they won’t see her again

Children of Iran Nobel Peace Prize winner fear they won’t see her again
  • Her twin 17-year-old children are due to accept the award at Oslo’s City Hall and give the Nobel Peace Prize lecture on her behalf
  • In a letter smuggled out of prison and published by Swedish broadcaster SVT this week, Mohammadi said she would continue to fight for human rights even if it led to her death

OSLO: The teenage children of jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi fear they will never meet their mother again, but said they were proud of her struggle for women’s rights as they prepared to accept the award on her behalf on Sunday.
Mohammadi, 51, who is serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on charges including spreading propaganda, won the award on Oct. 6 in a rebuke to Tehran’s theocratic leaders, prompting the Islamic Republic’s condemnation.
Her twin 17-year-old children, Ali and Kiana Rahman, who live in exile in Paris, are due to accept the award at Oslo’s City Hall and give the Nobel Peace Prize lecture on her behalf.
In a letter smuggled out of prison and published by Swedish broadcaster SVT this week, Mohammadi said she would continue to fight for human rights even if it led to her death. But she said she missed her children the most.
Kiana Rahman, who last saw her mother eight years ago, said: “When it comes to seeing her again, personally I am very pessimistic.”
“Maybe I’ll see her in 30 or 40 years, but I think I won’t see her again,” she told a press conference via a translator. “But that doesn’t matter because my mother will always live on in my heart and with my family.”
Mohammadi was awarded the Peace Prize just over a year after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iranian morality police after being detained for allegedly violating the rules of wearing a hijab, an Islamic head scarf.
Amini’s death provoked months of nationwide protests that posed the biggest challenge to Shiite clerical rule in years, and was met with a deadly security crackdown costing several hundred lives.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said the award for Mohammadi also recognized hundreds of thousands who had demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies discriminating and oppressing women.
Iran has called the protests Western-led subversion, accusing the Nobel committee of meddling and politicizing human rights.
Mohammadi’s son Ali said he had accepted from early childhood that the family would live apart, but said he would stay optimistic he might see her again.
“If we don’t see her again we will always be proud of her and go on with our struggle,” he said.
Mohammadi’s husband Taghi Rahmani said the award would give her a larger voice even if her own conditions were likely to become more difficult.
“It’s a political prize and therefore there will be more pressure on Narges, but at the same time it is going to create a space for echoing the voice of the people” said Rahmani, who will also attend Sunday’s ceremony.
Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the prize, which today is worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or around $1 million, and the fifth person to win it while in detention.
It is awarded on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.


Iran says reviving nuclear deal ‘useless’

Iran says reviving nuclear deal ‘useless’
Updated 54 min 16 sec ago
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Iran says reviving nuclear deal ‘useless’

Iran says reviving nuclear deal ‘useless’
  • “Today, the more we advance, the more the JCPOA becomes useless,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said
  • “We are not currently on the path to return to the agreement”

TEHRAN: Iran said Saturday that attempting to revive its landmark nuclear deal with world powers that was effectively scrapped by former US president Donald Trump was increasingly “useless.”
“Today, the more we advance, the more the JCPOA becomes useless,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a speech to students at the University of Tehran, using the initials of the official name of the nuclear deal.
In 2015, Iran agreed to curbs on its nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of sanctions.
But while the deal was signed with several world powers — including China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — it was rendered effectively useless when the United States unilaterally withdrew under Trump in 2018.
With the US reimposing sanctions, international banks and businesses have stayed away from Iran for fear of falling foul of US regulators.
Tentative efforts to revive the deal by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, have been at a standstill since mid-2022.
“Because (Iran’s) red lines have sometimes been ignored by the other side, we are not currently on the path to return to the agreement,” Amir-Abdollahian said.
“Of course, this does not mean that we have set the agreement aside. If the agreement serves our interests, (we will accept it) with all its flaws,” he added.
The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, called in October on the international community not to fail in Iran as it did in North Korea, which now has nuclear weapons.
Iran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, but since 2021 the UN body has struggled to monitor the development of its capabilities.


Turkiye’s Erdogan denounces UN ‘Israel protection council’

Turkiye’s Erdogan denounces UN ‘Israel protection council’
Updated 09 December 2023
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Turkiye’s Erdogan denounces UN ‘Israel protection council’

Turkiye’s Erdogan denounces UN ‘Israel protection council’
  • “Since October 7, the security council has become an Israel protection and defense council,” Erdogan said
  • “Is this justice?” asked Erdogan, adding that “the world is bigger than five,” a reference to the five veto-wielding nations in the UN Security Council

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday denounced the UN Security Council after the United States vetoed a cease-fire resolution for Gaza, describing the international body as the ‘Israel protection council’.
“Since October 7, the security council has become an Israel protection and defense council,” Erdogan said.
The United States on Friday vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the intense fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Washington thus dashed a growing clamour for a halt to fighting that had been led by UN chief Antonio Guterres and Arab nations.
“Is this justice?” asked Erdogan, adding that “the world is bigger than five,” a reference to the five veto-wielding nations in the UN Security Council.
“Another world is possible, but without America,” the Turkish leader said.
“The United States stands by Israel with its money and military equipment. Hey, America! How much are you going to pay for that?” he added.
“Every day the Declaration of Human Rights is violated in Gaza,” he said, as the world this weekend celebrates the 75th anniversary of the declaration.
The UN resolution for a cease-fire was submitted more than two months after the start of the war in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s bloody attack on Israeli soil on October 7, which, according to the Israeli authorities, killed 1,200 people.
Since then Hamas has put the death toll in Gaza at 17,490, mostly women and children.


Israelis on edge as fears grow of wider Lebanon conflict

Israelis on edge as fears grow of wider Lebanon conflict
Updated 09 December 2023
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Israelis on edge as fears grow of wider Lebanon conflict

Israelis on edge as fears grow of wider Lebanon conflict
  • In peacetime, visitors flock to the town to enjoy its pleasant climate and good surfing
  • For over two months, residents have been living under the threat of near-daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah

NAHARIYA, Israel: In the seaside haven of Nahariya, the shock still lingers on Daniel Bussidan’s face. A recent rocket attack killed his friend’s father, and now this Israeli beach town, the closest to Lebanon, stands on edge.
“I’m scared from the attack,” said the 26-year-old who works in his father’s pastry shop on the Mediterranean resort’s eucalyptus-lined main street.
His friend’s father was killed when a rocket struck his farm while he was working, Bussidan told AFP.
“He died on the spot,” Bussidan said.
In peacetime, visitors flock to the town to enjoy its pleasant climate and good surfing.
But for over two months, residents have been living under the threat of near-daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and powerful Lebanese movement Hezbollah.
The Iran-backed Shiite group says it entered the fray in support of Hamas on October 8, the day after the Palestinian militants launched their attack in Israel which killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.
Aiming to destroy Hamas, Israel launched a military offensive that the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza says has killed 17,490 people, mostly women and children, and left the Palestinian territory in ruins.
In northern Israel, residents fear a wider conflict emerging along the border with Lebanon, which snakes along a hill in the distance from Nahariya.
More than 120 people have been killed on the Lebanese side of the border since October 7, mostly Hezbollah fighters and more than a dozen civilians, according to an AFP tally.
Israel says six of its soldiers and four Israeli civilians have been killed in the area, and Lebanon lost its first soldier in the exchanges on Tuesday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hezbollah that if it “chooses to start a global war, then it will turn Beirut and South Lebanon... into Gaza and Khan Yunis with its own hands.”
Business has slumped along the Nahariya seafront, and many more rifles have appeared, slung over people’s shoulders.
Resident Nathalie Betito, 44, believes Hezbollah fighters could infiltrate the border. But she made a point of celebrating Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, with around 100 people at the central synagogue this week.
She and her husband Arie, 47, immigrated from France five years ago. Nahariya represents an attractive destination, with special tax breaks due to its exposed position.
Arie, who now helps new arrivals at the town hall, said residents were nonetheless living in peril.
Hezbollah has thousands of “missiles pointed at us,” he said, stressing that he did not believe in escalating the conflict into a “total” war.
“The price to pay would be huge,” he said. “Neither side wants that.”
But people in Nahariya are preparing for the worst. Efi Dayan, 60, said he “knows there’s going to be a war here.”
“We’re getting ready with food, clothes. We’re waiting for it,” he said calmly under the winter sun.
But the military job in Gaza needs to be completed first, said Bussidan, a former soldier himself.
“We have to finish Hamas and take care of all civilians on both sides,” he said.


New Gaza aid crossing at Kerem Shalom being tested, not open yet — UN official

New Gaza aid crossing at Kerem Shalom being tested, not open yet — UN official
Updated 09 December 2023
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New Gaza aid crossing at Kerem Shalom being tested, not open yet — UN official

New Gaza aid crossing at Kerem Shalom being tested, not open yet — UN official
  • New crossing will allow trucks from Jordan into Gaza

CAIRO: A new process for inspecting aid for Gaza at the Kerem Shalom crossing is being tested, but efforts to get permission for trucks to enter through the crossing and ramp up relief are still ongoing, a senior UN official told Reuters on Saturday.
Under the new system, trucks would come to the Kerem Shalom crossing on the border between Israel, Gaza and Egypt for the first time from Jordan, before entering Gaza from Rafah, about 3 km (1.86 miles) away.
But the trucks would need to be allowed to enter Gaza directly through Kerem Shalom to alleviate an increasingly desperate situation in the coastal enclave, said Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the UN World Food Programme.
Israel has so far rebuffed pleas from the United Nations and others to open Kerem Shalom, but they both signalled on Thursday that Kerem Shalom could soon help process delivery of humanitarian supplies into Gaza.
Until now, limited quantities of aid have been delivered from Egypt through the Rafah crossing, which is ill-equipped to process large numbers of trucks.
Trucks have been driving more than 40 km (24.85 miles) south to Egypt’s border with Israel before returning to Rafah, leading to bottlenecks and delays.
A process to test the inspection system at Kerem Shalom for trucks arriving from Jordan is underway, said Skau, who visited Gaza on Friday.
“It’s good, it’s useful because it would also be the first time that we can then bring in a pipeline from Jordan. But we need that entry point as well because that would make all the difference,” he said in an interview.
“If you get that open, then it’s just a matter of how much is available and how much can be absorbed on the other side in an orderly fashion, but then certainly that capacity would not be the issue,” he added.
“We have front-loaded with our internal resources so that we have food available in Egypt and in Jordan to reach some 1,000,000 people in one month. We are ready to roll. The trucks are ready to move.”
Skau said the situation inside Gaza was increasingly chaotic as people grabbed what they could from aid distribution points, with larger numbers of people displaced southwards close to the border with Egypt and aid trucks at risk of being stopped by desperate residents if they even slow down at an intersection.
“There is a question for how long this can continue, because the humanitarian operation is collapsing,” he said.
“Half of the population are starving, nine out of 10 are not eating every day. Obviously the needs are massive.”