İYİ Party candidate ‘confident’ about moving to second round of presidential elections

ANKARA

İYİ (Good) Party chair and presidential candidate Meral Akşener said on June 5 that the surveys show she will move on to the second round in presidential polls. 

President and ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has chosen the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Muharrem İnce as his rival, she said.

“But you will see in the first round. The voters are prudent and wise. I will be the one passing to the second round,” she said in a televised interview.

Akşener said her opinion is also based on 24 years of political experience in Turkey.

The İYİ Party candidate reasoned her expectations to reach the aisle in the second round of presidential elections to the fact that the CHP and her party have different electorates. Akşener said her party’s constituent is conservatives of the central right.

A group of voters, who are “tired of losing all the time, are feeling better with İnce. But my audience is conservatives of the central right,” she said.

Therefore, the center-right CHP constituency in the western part of Turkey have moved to the İYİ Party and are willing to vote for her party, Akşener stated.

The İYİ Party and the CHP, along with the Felicity Party (SP) and the Democrat Party (DP) are in an electoral alliance for the parliament elections on June 24 elections.

İYİ was founded by former members of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), another right-wing nationalist opposition party. Its members fell out with MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli after he allied with the ruling party.