President Erdoğan signals 2023 polls will be his last

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he will ask the people’s support for the last time in the 2023 presidential polls.

“Inshallah, in 2023, with the power of support from you that I am asking on my behalf for the last time, we will start the construction of the Turkish Century and deliver this blessed flag to our youth,” Erdoğan said at a rally in the Black Sea town of Samsun on Dec. 10.

Türkiye will hold presidential and parliamentary elections in 2023. Erdoğan has ruled Türkiye as the prime minister between 2003 and 2014 and since then as the president of the nation. A constitutional amendment in 2017 has changed the system into executive-presidency model and Erdoğan was elected as the president in 2018. He can run two times for the presidency under the new government system.

“Everyone with wisdom and conscience can see the difference between Türkiye that we have inherited from older generations and Türkiye that we will hand over to our youth,” he stated.

Recalling that he has been in politics almost half a century and that his sole objective was serving the nation regardless of which position he was in, Erdoğan said “This brother of yours has walked only with his people in his 50 years in politics. We went all over the county and that’s how we came to these days.”

Criticizing the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for appointing an American economy advisor, Erdoğan said “We have not walked these roads with foreign advisors. We have always relied on our people.”

Calling his Justice and Development Party (AKP) fellows to relentlessly work for 2023 elections, Erdoğan said he was confident that the opposition alliance will be totally defeated in the polls.

The opposition alliance cannot even dream the services and performances the AKP governments have fulfilled in the past 20 years, Erdoğan said, criticizing the vision outlined by Kılıçdaroğlu. Today’s realities of Türkiye are far from the projects or visions declared by the opposition, he said, “We are determined to turn 2023, the year in which we will enter the Century of Türkiye, into a symbol of a new era where we will take our country to the highest place in the global political and economic system. We will construct the Century of Türkiye in front of your eyes just like we did everything for this country.”