President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Türkiye's elections will be held on May 14 – a month earlier than scheduled – according to a video shared by his office Sunday.
Erdoğan, who plans to seek reelection, made the announcement during a Saturday youth conference in northwestern Bursa province. A video of the event was released Sunday.
"I am grateful to God that we will be walking side by side with you, our first-time voting youth, in the elections that will be held on May 14," Erdoğan told the group.
He said he would make the formal call on March 10, after which Türkiye’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) would prepare for the elections.
“This is not an early election, this is bringing forward the elections.”
The election date only becomes official once it is published in the government gazette.
If no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote, a second round of voting would be held on May 28.
A six-party opposition alliance has yet to put forth a presidential candidate. The Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) that is the third-largest in Parliament has so far been excluded from the alliance and said it might field its own candidate.
“Our people are seeking to choose a president to rule the country, they (the six party coalition) seek a candidate that the coalition partners will manage,” he said.
This year's elections were supposed to take place in June, but ruling party members said that month would coincide with summer and religious holidays, prompting an earlier date.
Most recently, main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu said that the alliance is fine with holding the country's next parliamentary and presidential elections on May 14.
The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) are partners under the People's Alliance, with Erdoğan serving as the alliance's candidate for the upcoming presidential elections.
The six allied opposition parties are running out of time, bickering about everything from policy and strategy to which candidate to field against the 68-year-old leader.
The opposition is formed by the Republican People's Party (CHP), Felicity Party (SP), Good Party (IP), Future Party (GP), Democrat Party (DP) and the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA).
The 2023 elections will likely be the first time with two rounds, as it will be the first since the country switched to a presidential system of governance.
It has been nearly five years since Türkiye switched from a parliamentary system to the current presidential one after most Turkish voters opted to create the new system. Turkish voters narrowly endorsed an executive presidency on April 16, 2017, with a referendum of 51.4% votes in favor. The official transition to the new system occurred when Erdoğan was sworn in as the president in Parliament after the 2018 general elections, which he won by a majority of 52.6% votes.
The opposition put aside their differences and united in the single task of unseating Erdoğan's allies in municipal elections in 2019.
They won mayoral races in Türkiye’s three main cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Now, they hope to do it all over again.
Yet, one of the potential presidential candidates of the opposition, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, was banned from politics last month for slander in a case stemming from his 2019 victory.
Imamoğlu can keep serving as mayor while the appeal process winds its way through the courts.
But a separate Interior Ministry probe against his office on "terrorism" charges threatens to sideline him sooner.
Erdoğan was himself deposed and briefly jailed when he was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s.
The twin cases make Imamoğlu's candidacy extremely risky for the opposition.
However, the case of the conviction of Imamoğlu also exposed the opposition's internal rivalries.
The risks around Imamoğlu have turned Kılıçdaroğlu into the most likely candidate to stand against Erdoğan.
But the 74-year-old former civil servant's failure to light up opinion polls has caused divisions within the six opposition parties.
