Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing the biggest test in his two-decade rule, although he still remains a formidable candidate. Opinion polls show that Erdogan’s AKP party and his nationalistic allies MHP will secure 45 per cent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, almost the same percentage as the six-party opposition bloc. However, in the Presidential elections, to be held at the same time on 14 May, the joint candidate of the opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, nicknamed Turkey’s Gandhi, is about 10 percentage points ahead of Erdogan.
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