Erdogan says he does not want to be a candidate for re-election in 2028

“I am not concerned about running again,” he said. declared the Turkish Islamo-nationalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday, May 22, to journalists from the pro-government press on the plane returning him from Hungary, where he had participated in the summit of the Organization of Turkic States, reports the daily Birgün .

"We want the new Constitution for our country, not for ourselves," added the head of state, whom the opposition suspects of wanting to adopt a new Constitution in order to be eligible for a new presidential term in 2028.

"You're presenting this as a gift to us, but in any case, according to the Constitution, you can no longer be a candidate," Ali Mahir Basarir, the leader of the main opposition party in the Assembly, the Republican People's Party (CHP), retorted, according to the online media Diken .

So far, the Turkish leader has been negotiating with the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) to secure the necessary number of MPs for a constitutional revision. But on May 22, he also reached out to the CHP opposition. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess that the CHP's conditions would be the release of imprisoned opponents and the holding of early elections," journalist Murat Yetkin points out on his blog .

But the Turkish president has ruled out the latter possibility, which has been called for by the opposition. "We are not going to throw Turkey into a political crisis while it is going through the most stable and powerful moment in its history," the reis dismissed, according to the daily Hürriyet .