Turkish presidential candidate quits race after release of alleged sex tape

Muharrem İnce pulls out just days from close election race saying alleged sex tape is deepfake

The Turkish presidential candidate Muharrem İnce withdrew from the race after the release of a purported sex tape, boosting chances of outright success for other candidates in a race that polls suggest will be close.

İnce, a two-time presidential candidate who also lost to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2018, pulled his candidacy just days away from Turkey’s most consequential election in a generation saying: “I offered Turkey a third option, a third way. We couldn’t succeed with this way.”

The former school headteacher and longtime member of the Republican People’s party (CHP) said an alleged sex tape circulating online was a deepfake, using footage taken from “an Israeli porn site”.

He added: “If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it’s slander. It’s not real.”

Polls indicate that the vote for the presidency will be a close one, where each candidate needs to get more than 50% in the first round to win outright, or face a runoff two weeks later. Erdoğan will now face CHP’s chairman, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, and the ultranationalist Sinan Oğan of the Victory party in a three-way race.

İnce had a small spike in popularity in the polls in which he peaked at roughly 10% of the overall vote share and more recently dropped down to almost 2% in some polls. While İnce had long seemed unlikely to win, his dwindling vote share was still enough to ensure that the presidential race would go to a runoff, a scenario observers believe could favour Erdoğan.

İnce formed his breakaway Homeland party two years ago after two failed bids to become party chairman of the CHP, plus a failed presidential run. Kılıçdaroğlu has led the CHP since 2010, and is spearheading a six-party opposition coalition hoping to defeat Erdoğan after 20 years in power.

Hours after İnce quit the race, Kılıçdaroğlu invited him to join the opposition coalition by tweeting a link to a classic Turkish ballad. “Let’s put aside the old resentments,” he told his former rival. Oğan reportedly cancelled a planned rally and called a meeting of his advisers, but party officials declared he had no plans to withdraw.

The polling organisation Metropoll predicted late last month that İnce voters would predominantly give their votes to Erdoğan’s AKP, the CHP, with some also going to the far-right Nationalist Movement party and the nationalist İyi (Good party) in the parliamentary race.

The high-profile deployment of deepfake videos has already hit Turkey’s 45-day election cycle, after Erdoğan played an alleged deepfake that claimed to show banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for Kılıçdaroğlu at a pre-election rally last weekend.

“What I have seen in these last 45 days, I have not seen in 45 years,” said İnce.

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