Cunning Erdogan. Is the outcome of the Turkish elections a foregone conclusion?

Sinan Ogan, who won third place in the first round of the Turkish presidential elections, said he will support incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the second round.

Turkey’s permanent president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was widely predicted to lose the election. But in the first round, the current head of state won 49.35% of the vote, and the candidate from the opposition coalition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 45% of the vote. Ahead of the second round, which will take place on May 28, Sinan Ogan, who came third with 5.22% of the vote, has called on his supporters to vote for Erdogan. At the same time, throughout his political career, Ogan opposed the current president.

A longtime critic of Erdogan

55-year-old Sinan Ogan is a Turk of Azerbaijani origin. He led

allocated to the Russia and Ukraine department of the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies. In 2004, Ogan founded the Türksam Center for International Relations and Strategic Analysis – as its head, he repeatedly attended meetings of the Valdai discussion club, where Vladimir Putin spoke every year. In 2009, Ogan defended his doctoral dissertation at the Russian MGIMO.

Ogan began his political career with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). In the 1970s, supporters of this party adhered to radical anti-communist and anti-Soviet ideas, and since the 1990s they began to actively oppose Kurdish separatists. Now the MPR occupies the extreme right side of the political system in Turkey, the party definitely does not recognize the Armenian genocide, calling the policy of the then government “relocation necessary to guarantee the security of the country.”

Ogan fully shared the position of the MPR until, in 2015, party leader Devlet Bahceli began to support the policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became president the previous year (before that, he actually led the country as prime minister from in 2003). Ogan, along with several other members of the Mongolian People’s Republic, who were opposed to the rapprochement between Bahceli and Erdogan, entered the opposition within the party, began to demand a revision of the party’s charter and the removal of Bahceli. Ogan has not been a member of any political party since 2017.

He did not change his views and did not abandon nationalist ideas, he advocates the return of Turkey to a parliamentary form of government (in 2017, on the initiative of Erdogan, the country became a presidential republic) and a stricter migration policy, and also called for active military intervention in the military conflict in Syria.

Pivot to the incumbent

In March 2023, Ogan announced that he was nominated by his candidacy for the presidential election from the Alliance ATA bloc – it includes the Zafer, Adalet, Ulkem and Turkiye Ittifaki parties, which also adhere to nationalist positions.

In his election program, the politician stressed that he wants to limit the power of the president. Ogan tried to win over the youth and declared that “it is impossible to build a new Turkey with a repressive mentality.” Ogan pledged to send refugees from Syria and Afghanistan “back to their countries” and to aggressively pursue “terrorists,” as he called the Kurds.

Immediately after the first round, both favorites made an appointment with Ogan to get the support of the 2.8 million voters who voted for him. The media immediately called Ogan a person who could determine the outcome of the election.

Ogan said he is ready to support Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy if he rejects ties with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The Kurdish provinces voted most actively for Kılıçdaroğlu, who himself belongs to the Alevi religious minority. After meeting with Kılıçdaroğlu, Ogan said he “received answers” to the questions he was interested in, but did not specify what he meant. On the same day, he met with Erdogan, after which he announced his support for the current president.

Erdogan’s support could get Ogan a position in the future government.