Turkey’s opposition has picked its man

IT TOOK THEMCHPCHP CHP long enough. On March 6th, with fewer than 70 days left before the expected date of Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, a group of six opposition party leaders, known collectively as the Nation Alliance or the Table of Six, unveiled Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the Republican People’s Party (), as their presidential candidate. The atmosphere outside the Ankara headquarters of the Felicity Party, where the meeting took place, was hardly electric. As Mr Kilicdaroglu spoke, his political allies looked on with stony faces. Meral Aksener, the head of the Iyi (“Good”) party, the second-biggest group in the alliance, looked as if she had swallowed a bar of soap.Mr Kilicdaroglu’s nomination, expected to be a formality, became a drama. On March 3rd, a day after opposition leaders confirmed they had settled on a candidate, Mrs Aksener suddenly walked away from the Table of Six, said she refused to back Mr Kilicdaroglu, and called on Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, to throw their hats in the ring. Choosing between Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Mr Kilicdaroglu was choosing “between death and malaria”, she said. She caved in at the 11th hour, after the leader promised to appoint the two mayors as his vice-presidents. Turkey’s vice-presidency, however, does not count for much.