Turkish presidential candidate İnce quits race days before vote

Withdrawal set to boost opposition leader’s chances of unseating President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Turkish presidential candidate Muharrem İnce has withdrawn from the contest days before a tightly contested election, boosting the main opposition contender’s chances of ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after almost two decades.

İnce, who was Erdoğan’s main opponent in the previous election in 2018, said on Thursday that he would step out of the race for the good of the country. He has been under pressure since an alleged sex tape surfaced earlier this week.
The 59-year-old founder and leader of the Memleket (Homeland) party said he had been the victim of a “character assassination” throughout the election campaign.

The main opposition contender Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who is representing a six-party coalition, has been locked in a tight race with Erdoğan ahead of Sunday’s poll, widely considered one of the most important elections in a generation.

A new poll released on Thursday by Konda Research and Consultancy, which is closely followed by foreign investors, showed Kılıçdaroğlu in the lead with 49.3 per cent of the vote, compared with 43.7 per cent for Erdoğan, after distributing undecided voters. A separate survey released on Thursday by Metropoll also put Kılıçdaroğlu in front.

“I’m withdrawing from the candidacy,” İnce, who has been polling in the low single digits, said in a televised press conference. “I offered a third option to Turkey, I tried to open a channel but [we] could not succeed in this channel. No excuses left,” he added.

A significant share of İnce supporters are expected to transfer their backing to Kılıçdaroğlu, analysts say. But since İnce’s name will still be on ballot papers, uncertainty remains over the extent to which support will shift in the final days before the vote.

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Timothy Ash, an emerging markets sovereign debt strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, said there was an “assumption that most of [the İnce] votes now go to Kılıçdaroğlu”.

He added that İnce’s withdrawal increased the chances that Kılıçdaroğlu could clinch more than half the votes, reaching the bar necessary to win the presidential election.

Still, many analysts say the race is too close to call and say there is a high chance it will proceed to an unprecedented second round on May 28.

Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of the Teneo consultancy, said the withdrawal of the “spoiler” İnce “may reflect positively on Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu‘s chances . . . but it is unclear whether this will be enough to secure him more than 50 per cent of the votes needed to win”.

Erdoğan has led Turkey for two decades and remains a popular politician. His backing has fallen recently, however, thanks to concerns about his economic management and an erosion of civil freedoms over the past decade.

Investors reacted positively to both the new polls and İnce’s withdrawal from the race, pushing the price of Turkey’s international bonds higher. A US dollar-denominated bond maturing in 2030 was trading on Thursday with a yield of 8.54 per cent, down from about 9.2 per cent at the start of the week.

Bond yields fall when prices rise. The cost of protecting against a default on Turkish debt also declined, with the spread on five-year credit default swaps falling to 490 basis points from above 550 bps earlier this month, according to Bloomberg data. The spread had risen as high as almost 900 bps last summer.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023