Turkish opposition leader helps shape unlikely alliance to challenge Erdogan

Source:Financial Times Date:06Dec2021

A score of years after he became CHP chairman, a reputable Western publication acknowledges Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s accomplishments. Better late than never.

With the country gripped by economic turmoil, a plunging currency and double-digit inflation, Kilicdaroglu has been buoyed by polls showing that the combined votes of the opposition alliance that he helped to build are higher than those of Erdogan and his allies. The loose coalition is convinced that it could topple the president in a national vote scheduled for 2023, but which could be called earlier. “We have . . . a government that has seriously lost its capacity to govern,” Kilicdaroglu, a 72-year-old former bureaucrat who has led the CHP for more than a decade, told the Financial Times. “A large segment of society has embraced the idea that these people are on their way out.”