ANKARA – As Turks head to the polls on Sunday to pick a new parliament and president, the country is at a crossroads, with new suspicions of foreign intervention in the elections.
On Thursday night, Turkiye’s opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu accused Russia of tampering with Turkish elections, claiming that Russians are behind the “deep fake” and derogatory content that has been circulating on social media for the previous several days.
“Dear Russian friends, you are behind the montages, conspiracies, deep fake content and recordings that were exposed in this country yesterday. If you want our friendship to continue after May 15, get your hands off the Turkish state. We still side by cooperation and friendship,” he said in Turkish, and tweeted it also in Russian.
Moscow, on the other hand, dismissed Kilicdaroglu’s charges, saying in a statement, “If someone gave him such information, they are liars.”
“Russia has the capability and track record of using disinformation to influence, to impact politics in other countries,” Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Arab News. Russian electoral meddling in the United States and Germany is widely documented.
“It is also not a secret that Russia takes sides in Turkish domestic politics. Therefore, it would come as no surprise if Russia conducted malign influence operations in Turkiye as well,” he claimed.
Russia has been accused of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, as well as the French presidential campaign and the German elections in 2017.
