Close to 48 percent of Turks believe that incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will not win the next presidential election scheduled for 2023, while some 46 percent say he will be re-elected, according to the results of a survey.
The “Turkey’s Pulse” survey, conducted by Metropoll in March, indicated that 45.7 percent of respondents think Erdoğan will win yet another presidential election, while 47.6 percent said they don’t believe Erdoğan will be elected to a third term.
Erdoğan was first elected president for a seven-year non-renewable term in 2014 by a direct vote under the parliamentary system. Turkey switched to presidential system of governance with a referendum in 2017 and held snap presidential and parliamentary polls in 2018, when Erdoğan was elected president again.
To the same question asked in the company’s survey in February, 42.6 percent said they believed Erdoğan would win the next presidential election.
According to the survey, Erdoğan’s role of mediator in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine helped him to earn several more points in March.
Turkey, which did not take part in international sanctions against Russia, hosted two rounds of peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators in March.
A total of 31.1 percent of respondents of the survey said Erdoğan would not be able to win the presidential election if it were held next Sunday, while 30.2 percent said he would, which was 2.6 points higher than the figure in February.
Metropoll has been asking people regularly since August 2020 about their views concerning Erdoğan’s chances of winning the next presidential election.
While the percentage of people who believed he could win the next presidential election was 55.4 percent in August 2020, there has been a 9.7 point fall in this figure over the past one-and-a-half years. In the meantime, there has been an 8.5 point increase in the percentage of people who think Erdoğan cannot win the next election in the same period.
Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been losing public support in the public surveys at a time when staggeringly high cost of living has become the new normal in Turkey, where recent increases in food and utility prices are pushing up inflation, further crippling the purchasing power of citizens
In March consumer prices accelerated to 61.14 percent at an annual rate, up from 54.4 percent in February.
