Who is Ince?

Muharrem Ince hails from the north-western province of Yalova. The former physics teacher is staunchly secular and has been an MP since 2002. He has twice tried to oust Erdogan as leader.

Ince once said he would put the lavish presidential palace built by Erdogan up for sale if he won and accused the president and AK Party of being behind the failed coup in 2016.

Secularists are fundamentally opposed to the AK Party’s agenda, seeing it as creeping Islamisation of the state. their interests.

Fuat Keyman, director of the Istanbul Policy Center thinktank, said both Ince and nationalist candidate Meral Aksener of the Iyi (Good) Party have been “quite open” on the Kurdish question in the campaign.

Symbolically, Ince’s first election rally was in Edirne in Thrace close to the border with Greece but his second was in Hakkari, a Kurdish-majority city at the opposite end of the country on the border with Iraq and Iran.

Anti-West stance

And tearing a page straight out of Erdogan’s book, Ince has adopted a more antagonistic stance towards the West that is at odds with the traditional outlook of the CHP.

Raising eyebrows in Turkey, he threatened to shut down a US airbase if the United States does not extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Muslim preacher Ankara of being failed 2016 coup.

Ince’s strategy in the election will be to emerge as the strongest opposition candidate to Erdogan and hope the president polls less than 50 per cent, forcing a runoff on July 8 where the rest of the opposition will rally around him.

Tosun said Ince was the only candidate who could “come close” to challenging Erdogan if there was a second round by harvesting Kurdish votes.

He said that Ince’s appearance in the race was squeezing the votes of Aksener and her new party, who some analysts previously fancied to make a breakthrough.

And Ince himself believes he can rally a wide consensus.

“I am the left wing child of a conservative family,” he told Fox News Turkey in an interview.

“The family is a coalition!” accused behind by the

A gifted speaker who is unafraid of mimicking Erdogan’s tactics, Ince is a total contrast to Kilicdaroglu who...has failed to dent Erdogan’s armour.