Incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu have gathered their supporters on the last day of their campaign for Sunday’s decisive second round of presidential elections.
The two candidates are targeting around 8 million voters who did not go to the polls in the first round.
A first round of voting on May 14 showed Erdogan ahead of the opposition’s Kemal Kilicdaroglu, and Erdogan’s AK Party and its allies secured a parliamentary majority on the first ballot.
Erdogan paid tribute to his conservative predecessor on Saturday with a visit to Istanbul’s Adnan Menderes mausoleum to gather his conservative base.
Menderes was tried and hanged a year after the army staged a coup in 1960 to put Turkey back on a more secular course. Erdogan survived a putsch attempt against his own Islamist government in 2016.
“The era of coups and juntas is over,” the 69-year-old declared after laying a wreath at his mentor’s grave.
“I call on you once again to go to the polls. Tomorrow is a special day for all of us.”
Erdogan told followers in January that he wanted to continue Menderes’ fight for religious rights and nationalist causes in the officially secular but predominantly Muslim republic of 85 million people.
Erdogan defeated Kilicdaroglu by almost five percentage points in the first round of voting.
But Erdogan’s failure to cross the 50 percent threshold triggered Turkey’s first run-off on Sunday and underlined the gradual ebbing of his support. Erdogan, who has led the country for 20 years, is still seen as the frontrunner. Recent polls suggest a close race.
Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar, reporting from Ankara, said Erdogan’s message has not changed significantly since the first round of the elections.
“He made a promise to make the next century the century of Turkey. He told voters that he would continue the mega project and strengthen the defense industry in the country. He promised a more powerful and assertive Turkey in the international arena,” he said.
Kilicdaroglu, who heads an opposition coalition of conservatives, secular parties and nationalists, ended his campaign with a speech at the Family Support Insurance Meeting in the capital Ankara.
Kilicdaroglu has focused on more immediate issues as he tries to come up from behind. In a bid to win over nationalist voters, the opposition challenger has pledged to expel Syrian refugees.
“To attract the nationalist voices, Kilicdaroglu has targeted anti-refugee sentiment in the country and pledged to return millions of Syrian, Afghan and Pakistani refugees to their countries. For now, the opposition is trying to appeal to nationalists,” Al Jazeera’s Serdar said.
On Friday, Kilicdaroglu used a late night TV interview to accuse Erdogan’s government of unfairly blocking his mass text messages to voters.
“They are afraid of us,” said the 74-year-old former official.
He repeated the same claim on Saturday.
“I can’t text reporters announcing our campaign program. Telecom companies prevent me from sending text messages to journalists. I have a total blackout. We cannot even hold elections in Turkey. This man [Erdogan] is a coward, he is a coward,” he said.
Observers have said Turkey’s votes are free of interference on election days – but unfair as the odds are stacked against the opposition beforehand.
“These were competitive but still limited elections,” said Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Election Observation Mission Chief Michael Georg Link after the first round.
“The criminalization of some political forces… completely prevented political pluralism and hindered individuals’ rights to participate in elections,” Link said.
Erdogan’s consolidation of power has included an almost complete monopolization of the media by the government and its corporate allies.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimated that in April Erdogan received 60 times as much airtime on state broadcaster TRT Haber as Kilicdaroglu.
“They have taken over all the institutions,” Kilicdaroglu said in his televised interview.
Many issues have steered voters for or against Erdogan: while his first decade in power was marked by strong economic growth and warm relations with Western powers, his second began with a corruption scandal and quickly spiraled into a political crackdown and years of economic turmoil affected many of the early gains.
Another issue that took center stage in the run-up to the election was the state of the economy, growing concerns over the fate of Turkey’s beleaguered lira and the stability of its banks.
Erdogan forced the central bank to press ahead with his unconventional theory that lower interest rates lower inflation, but Turkey’s annual inflation hit 85 percent last year as the lira briefly free-falled.
Economists believe that Erdogan’s government needs to change course and raise interest rates sharply or stop supporting the lira if it wants to avoid a full-blown crisis after the vote.