Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that he will not respond to the demands of the losing presidential candidate, Sinan Ogan, who is calling for the expulsion of refugees from Turkey, as one of his conditions for supporting any of the two candidates who qualified for the second round of the Turkish elections.
Erdogan’s speech came in an exclusive interview with CNN, in which he partly touched on his plans for Syrian refugees in Turkey if he is re-elected.
“The opposition is constantly focusing on one thing,” Erdogan said. “It says: When we come to power, we will return the Syrian refugees in Turkey. It is impossible for me to agree with that.”
“If we are going to do something like this, we will have to take certain measures,” the Turkish president noted, saying that “Turkish non-profit organizations are building housing units in the northern parts of Syria, so that refugees here in Turkey can return to their homeland.”
“This process has already started and we are now launching another initiative to encourage one million refugees to return to their homeland. We are building housing units. These are good projects,” he added.
Earlier Friday, the Turkish President met with Sinan Ogan. The Turkish presidency published pictures of the meeting in the Dolmabahçe Palace on the European side of Istanbul, which was not previously announced, and lasted an hour, without immediately issuing any statement about the meeting.
The issue of the party that Ogan will support, between Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu in the second round of the elections, is the main concern of public opinion in Turkey, in light of efforts to polarize it by the presidential candidates.
The meeting came after another meeting, Friday, that brought together the opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, with the leader of the Victory Party, which is hostile to Syrian refugees, Umit Ozdag, the founder of the “ancestors” coalition that nominated Ogan for the elections.
After the meeting, Kilicdaroglu said that they had a fruitful meeting, noting that he discussed with Ozdag the problems related to Turkey and the world, and they made the necessary assessments in this context.
He explained that he informed Ozdag about the efforts of the leaders of the “Nation Alliance” related to the joint memorandum and the constitutional amendment, pointing out that he answered some of the questions posed by the leader of the Victory Party in detail.
He pointed out that Ozdag will hold consultations with the other parties of the “ATA Alliance” and its candidate, Sinan Ogan, regarding the ideas he conveyed to him.
For his part, Ozdag said: “We had questions we asked and got detailed answers about them, and accordingly we will meet with the responsible authorities and evaluate them in the coalition, the rest of the parties, and with candidate Sinan Ogan.” He added, “We had evaluations and we will have new evaluations, and in a short period we will announce to the public our ideas, and I thank Kilicdaroglu for his visit.”
In the context, the Supreme Elections Authority announced, on Friday, the final results of the presidential elections, and published them in the repeated issue of the Official Gazette.
The authority confirmed that Erdogan obtained 49.52% of the votes from the total votes cast inside and outside Turkey and at the border crossings, while his rival Kilicdaroglu got 44.88% of the votes.
Sinan Ogan also received 5.17%, and the withdrawing candidate Muharrem İnce received 0.43%. The commission indicated that the participation rate in the elections amounted to 87.04%, after considering one million and 37 thousand and 104 invalid votes, and it was not calculated for any candidate.
