Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has appeared publicly for the first time after a three-day break due to illness. Two weeks before the presidential and parliamentary elections, Erdogan spoke at an event on domestically developed defense technology in Istanbul on Saturday.
There he also announced the candidate for Turkey’s deployment on the International Space Station (ISS). Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbaiba attended the meeting.
In the elections on May 14, Erdogan, as representative of the Islamic conservative AK party, has to fear for his re-election after 20 years in power. Polls put his strongest challenger, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, at least on par. He is the joint candidate for an alliance of six parties from different camps and is also supported by the pro-Kurdish HDP. On Friday, Kilicdaroglu announced that if he won the election, he would set up a space research center at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.
Erdogan had to withdraw temporarily from the hot phase of the election campaign on Tuesday. The 69-year-old had previously interrupted a television interview because of stomach problems. Until then, he had completed around three public appointments per day.
This Saturday, the CHP – the leading party in the opposition bloc around Kilicdaroglu – announced that it would hire up to half a million people as election observers. There are “serious concerns” about the security of the elections, Oguz Kaan Salici, the CHP politician in charge of the arrangements, told reporters in Istanbul. In view of the fact that a large part of the Turkish media is directly or indirectly under Erdogan’s control and there is therefore no real freedom of information, foreign observers have also expressed their concerns about the fairness of the elections.