Turkish President Erdogan faces an alliance of opposition parties looking to remove him from office

In the run-up to Turkey’s snap elections called for June 24, there is one thing the highly polarized electorate seems to agree on: The defining issue in the country is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan is the longest-serving leader in Turkey’s modern history, and much of that success has depended on wooing a pious constituency that makes up perhaps half of the nation’s 80 million people.

But his increasingly polarizing rhetoric, one that posits political opponents as an existential threat to a conservative way of life, may be backfiring. A coalition of secular and religious leaders believes he has gone too far and is uniting to defeat him at the ballot box.

The country has been under a state of emergency since July 2016, after a coup attempt by a military faction was thwarted by civilians. Since then, more than 50,000 people have been jailed under charges of terrorism, in what critics say is a dragnet that encompasses not just those connected to the failed putsch, but also all of those opposing Erdogan.

“We are under extraordinary conditions, and sometimes extraordinary conditions make it obligatory for you to find extraordinary solutions,” said Ali Tirali, a member of the secular Republican People’s Party, or CHP, the second largest party in parliament. “Everyone in Turkey believes we need to unite against Erdogan.”

Four major opposition parties announced Wednesday that they will form an alliance in the June 24 elections in an attempt to unseat Erdogan. The coalition, dubbed the Democracy Alliance in the Turkish press, consists of the CHP, the Islamist Saadet Party, the right-wing Democratic Party and the center-right Iyi Party.

The alliance, which follows weeks of frantic meetings between opposition political leaders, would allow each party to be represented in parliament, bypassing a decades-old law that requires that a party receive at least 10% of votes to be granted a portion of the 600 seats in the legislature. Although the alliance will work together for parliamentary seats, each party is fielding its own presidential candidate.

Whoever is elected president in June will inherit a new constitutional system that hands the office wide powers approved by voters in an April 2017 referendum. The office of prime minister will be eliminated, and the president will have powers to unilaterally dissolve parliament and trigger new elections and appoint judges to top courts.

Polls show Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its allied right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, garnering about 50% of votes. It appears the opposition, if it can field a candidate that draws on the broad discontent with the government, could force the longtime leader into a runoff and possibly a second-round defeat.

Such an outcome would be stunning for Erdogan, who has led the country, first as prime minister and then as president, for 15 years.

Two decades ago Erdogan and many Islamists in Turkey belonged to a single political party, the Welfare Party, led by former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who ran on a nationalist ticket that espoused a pan-Islamist union instead of the pursuit of European Union membership. But Erdogan, hoping to draw a broader voter base, formed the AKP in 2001 and called for economic and social reforms so Turkey could enter the EU.

The AKP, with its broad capitalist appeal, became an unmatched political force, opening trade with the West that brought economic prosperity to Turkey. The country’s GDP tripled under the party, which poured increased revenue into major infrastructure projects to modernize cities such as Istanbul, and construct scores of new universities across Turkey.

Erdogan has said that for Turkey to continue the economic gains it has made under the AKP, it must transition fully into the new presidential system with a strong leader at the helm. Turkey will enter a “new era of greater prosperity, wealth and freedom … one where the executive is more effective,” he said.

In April, he announced that presidential and parliamentary elections originally scheduled for November 2019 would be held in June.

But in recent years conservatives have become worried about Erdogan’s authoritarian ways, Soner Cagaptay, author of “The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey,” said in an interview.

“The AKP is no more about a political Islamist ideology, it’s about Erdogan personally, and whatever helps him get elected,” he said. “You could be a political Islamist, but if you don’t support him, you are considered an enemy of Erdogan.”

The polarization in Turkey has meant that the conservative Saadet Party has emerged as a kingmaker, making overtures to the secular CHP that have been met with applause by the half of the country seeking to unseat Erdogan. Saadet’s head, Temel Karamollaoglu, a British-educated engineer, has spent the last few weeks working to draw Erdogan’s voter base away from the AKP.

Karamollaoglu has met not only with leaders from the secular CHP, but also with Kurdish leaders and the center-right Iyi Party, garnering widespread media coverage for a party that normally goes unnoticed.

He announced Tuesday that he would run as Saadet’s candidate, offering a pointedly unifying message that stood in sharp contrast to the polemics on which Erdogan campaigns.

“The issue in this country is not a matter of rightist-leftist,” Karamollaoglu told supporters in Ankara, the capital. “The issue in this country is not a matter of conservative or liberal either. The issue in this country is about the oppressors and the downtrodden.”

His outspoken criticism of Erdogan’s targeting of opponents under the state of emergency has struck a chord with the CHP, despite the party’s reputation as a secular stalwart. Traditionally, the CHP, which champions a vision of Turkey where the state keeps strict checks on religion, has been at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Islamist Saadet Party.

The most visible symbol of the CHP’s secular vision has been the headscarf, which was banned in most public institutions, including schools, until 2011, when Erdogan’s party pushed through reforms lifting the restriction. The struggle to enact that reform — which Erdogan and the AKP have made a hallmark of election campaigns — was long thwarted by the CHP.

Saadet, including many of its current leaders, sided with Erdogan and against the CHP over issues such as the headscarf ban, but today, that issue has been set aside, and Erdogan is seen by the Islamist party as a greater threat to the country.

Despite their ideological differences, there is precedent for the CHP forming a government with an Islamist party. In 1974, the CHP and Erbakan, the leader Erdogan once followed, served in a coalition government.

“People who are Saadet members, for instance shopkeepers in my neighborhood, I sense a rapprochement between them and us,” Tirali said. “We share main concerns, like the state of emergency or the economy.”

“Of course, for us, secularism is very important, but I think that many people who are on the conservative side of society see the importance of secularism too, particularly with all the things that have happened in recent years in Turkey,” Tirali said. “Secularism is a living issue, it can be discussed later, and it is open to new understandings.”

Farooq is a special correspondent.