A candidate who enjoys an unprecedented media power behind him suddenly appears quite eager for a debate with his rival on screen despite the fact that his party has got a decision for not facing off against rival politicians in such debates and faithfully abided this decision for 17 years… As if this itself is not interesting enough, he nominates a journalist known to be perhaps one of the most ardent opponents of his party in the dissenting media as the ‘moderator‘ of the proposed debate and makes the same offer to another dissident journalist -he accepted the offer- when the first nominee declines the offer…
Don’t you find something strange in this picture?
To me, it seems strange. This is the reason why I had doubts about the occurrence of such a debate although the groundwork for the program was already laid out.
Another reason why I approached occurrence of the debate with caution was this: We heard that representatives of the two rival candidates, ‘applying the US model‘ for their debate, came to an agreement concerning the groundwork of the event, according to which, the both candidates would be asked the same questions and expected to respond to questions within the same amount of time…
This rule was disadvantageous to AK Party’s candidate.
Those who follow election campaigns of the two candidates know that the candidate of the ruling party speaks slowly and distinctly, occasionally wandering off and making it somewhat difficult to understand what he is getting at while the opposition’s candidate articulates himself well and speaks like a machine gun when required.