By Fehmi Koru, former columnist and blogger
There is no election on Sunday, the closest being the ‘local election’ which is at the end of March. However, let me ask my question: If there was an election next Sunday, which party would you vote for?
Survey companies ask such a question at regular intervals. Metropoll also asked citizens between 10-16 October.
The rate of those who intend to vote for the AK Party, which received 35.32% of the votes in the elections held in May, is 15.2%…
CHP received 25.41% of the votes in the last election, those who plan to vote for it are 15.2%…
MHP had received 10.04% of the votes, now it can receive 4.7%.
İYİ Party’s vote was 9.90%, and it seems to have dropped to 5.7%.
Pro-Kurdish rights party HDP, which participated in the election as the Green Left Party and received 8.79% of the votes, has now changed its name to the People’s Equality and Democracy Party (HEDEP), and it looks like it can get 5.9% of the votes.
Those who would vote for the Islamist New Welfare Party are 1.3%, for anti-immigrant Victory Party are 1.4%, and the votes of other parties are 3.4% in total.
The remaining ones, those who say “I am undecided” (20.3), those who will vote in protest (11.8) and those who do not want to answer (7.1%), constitute the largest group with 39.2%…
I guess this level of indifference to existing parties has never been seen before.
This picture may come as a surprise to some of us, but not come to me; many of us did not vote wholeheartedly in the last election. After exercising our constitutional right, some of us regretted it because things did not go according to our expectations. It’s still happening.
The ruling AK Party seems to be aware of the lack of interest towards them, five months before the local elections. The party also conducta surveys for internal use. Metropoll has also asked “Is Türkiye getting better or worse?” The answers to the question are as follows:
“It’s getting better” 23.0%;
“It’s getting worse” is 66.9%…
While those who say “The economy is managed well” remains at 20.6%, the rate of those who say it is not being managed well is 76%… Negative views are also high in AK Party (56.0) and MHP (59.2%). Alarm bells must be ringing in the government.
The only thing to regret when looking at the table is that none of the political parties seem to make you excited about voting…
Normally, if some parties are disappointing, there will be a shift towards the other parties among the existing ones. There have been many examples of this in the past, the last example was encountered before the 2002 election. In that election, while voters buried the parties that were in power until then – DSP, ANAP and MHP, as well as DYP, they crowned the newly established AK Party as their new government.
That picture was also reflected in public opinion polls before the election. This time, it seems that voters will not support the existing parties in the elections.
Generally, in such environments, either a new party emerges or existing parties change in order to make themselves preferable to voters again.
There is no new party on the horizon that will immediately attract attention when established. If there is, at least I don’t have any information about it. Only in CHP, the desire to renew itself is felt, accompanied by the frequently used concept of ‘change’.
Is there any possibility of change in CHP?
There are findings in Metropoll’s research that may provide an answer to this question.
“Would you like (chairman candidate) Özgür Özel or (incumbant) Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to be CHP leader?” The question was asked to all subjects. Our people want Özgür Özel (46.5%) more than Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (22.5%). More than twice as much.
When we take a closer look at the data, it becomes clear that the situation is not much different with the preferences of those who voted for CHP in the previous election: Özgür Özel 58.5%, K. Kılıçdaroğlu 27.9%…
More importantly, in Metropoll’s survey a month ago, K. Kılıçdaroğlu (44.2%), was ahead of Özel (41.9%). The situation was reversed within a month…
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