“You stood against him, and he defeated you. You stood again, and he defeated you again,” Muharrem Ince famously said in a message addressed to Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) he sought to unseat as party leader in 2015. Ince personally lost to Kılıçdaroğlu and, later, to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the presidential vote of 2018. Never the one to back down, Ince, a former teacher, rechallenges Erdoğan in the upcoming elections and vents his fury against his former party.
The leader of Homeland Party told a private broadcaster on Wednesday that the “Table for Six” led by CHP cannot “win the vote,” and even if they won, their tenure would be “short.”
Ince said the current formation of the opposition bloc would undoubtedly lead to fracture, claiming that CHP and its main partner – Good Party (IP) – cannot agree with three other partners. “Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu would send Ali Babacan to the Supreme Court (for his trial), but now he wants to make him his vice president,” Ince told the broadcaster Habertürk. Babacan, a former minister, from the Chairs Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), is a part of the bloc. The opposition bloc considers appointing leaders of all parties as vice presidents if it wins the vote. He proposed a new alliance with his party, IP and CHP.
“Yes, we should defeat this administration but also send off this opposition. They have a prayer that will not be answered,” he said, quoting a Turkish saying about hoping the impossible to happen. “You can’t win by perception management and political engineering. They say they will win 60% of the vote and claim I am the obstacle on their path,” he said, referring to the opposition supporters’ claims that İnce sought to play into the hands of Erdoğan by dividing the vote share of opposition parties. “(CHP spokesperson) Faik Öztrak said the same thing at the same pace when Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu was nominated,” he said, referring to the opposition’s 2014 candidate who won only around 38% of the vote against Erdoğan.
Ince claimed that it was not only online “trolls” of the AK Party that targeted him with their criticism, but CHP “trolls”, and denied accusations that AK Party secretly supported him. “I can win more votes than AK Party, while Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu cannot. They know this. But CHP does not need AK Party to (trick) their supporters to change allegiance. CHP itself does it,” he said, referring to an online campaign by opposition supporters against him. He said CHP does not know “how to calculate the vote.” “It does not matter whether you win, for example, 35% of the vote. You will lose anyway,” he asserted.
