Stickers promising voters that prices will fall after Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the presidential candidate of the opposition, wins the 14 May elections emerged in Turkey’s supermarkets on Saturday.
Voters who have started using supermarkets as venues to run their own election campaigns this week started sharing photos of stickers put on different products on social media.
“Promise to you! Mr. Kemal will come and those prices will fall,” read the stickers.
The new wave of stickers followed previous ones which propagated that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his far-right ally Devlet Bahçeli was responsible for the spiking inflation that has seriously devastated the purchasing power of those living in the country.
“Do you think this is expensive? Thanks to Erdoğan,” was written on one of the stickers with the president’s photo. “Keep this in mind when voting,” it added.
“This product is expensive because of us,” read another sticker, which featured photographs of Erdoğan and Bahçeli.
Mahir Akkoyun, who was the creator of the sticker campaign and the designer of the stickers, was detained on Friday in the western province of İzmir. Akkoyun, who shares all his designs for the elections for free, was later released with a travel ban.
Turkey’s inflation rate slowed for a fifth consecutive month in March from a high of more than 85 percent according to official figures, though many in Turkey, including leading economists, question the accuracy of state statistics. According to a group of independent economists, consumer prices increased at an annualised rate of 112.5 percent in March, down from 126.9 percent in February.
The opposition in Turkey holds Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies responsible for the cost of living crises in the country. The economic hardships faced by the population have severely harmed Erdoğan’s popularity ahead of 14 May elections.
