Turkey’s Erdogan Channels Trump in Panicked Election Threats
ISTANBUL—Turkish opposition officials say their supporters will take to the streets in “massive protests” if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan follows through on his threat not to concede power if he loses this Sunday’s presidential election.
Erdogan has implied that his main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), is being supported by a Kurdish militia, the PKK, that has launched a decades-long insurgency in the country and is categorized as a terrorist organization by the Turkish government and the U.S.
“My people will not surrender this country to an individual who became president with the backing they received from Kandil,” Erdogan said at a rally last week, referring to a mountainous region in Iraq that the PKK operates from.