The final countdown: Turkey is on a knife-edge

‘Kilicdaroglu’ is a pronunciation nightmare for the non-Turkish. Yet after this Sunday’s presidential elections, international news presenters, who have struggled for 20 years with President Erdogan’s soft ‘g’, might have to work harder to articulate the name of the social democrat leader of opposition. ‘You may call him Mr Kemal [his first name] until he wins,’ I’ve been saying to journalist friends. It’s the kind of simplification that people from complex, non-western countries are self-trained to give so our maddening realities can be better understood: ‘To feel Turkey, imagine the acute polarisation during the Brexit referendum continuing for 20 years. Add to that a far more ruthless Trump with political genius and Islamist aspirations.’

And since March, when the election campaign for the presidency and parliament began, my line has been quite simple: ‘Either Mr Kemal wins against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or we lose the country for good. This is the final countdown.’

If Erdogan’s 20-year rule does not end on Sunday, no political leader will be able to challenge him afterwards. The country will become unliveable, not only for disobedient ones like myself (I left in 2016 after my criticisms of the President cost me my job as a journalist) but for anybody who is not submissive enough. Already famous for his illegal purges of political rivals and critics, Erdogan has been hinting at the imprisonment – or worse – of Mr Kemal.

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Devlet Bahceli, a key Erdogan ally and leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement party, told a rally that opposition ‘traitors’ deserve ‘bullets in their bodies’. The President’s supporters have frequently tried to attack Mr Kemal on the campaign trail – and this week Ekrem Imamoglu, Mr Kemal’s vice-presidential candidate, was pelted with stones.