TURKEY PERSPECTIVE

Ankara approaches the Colombian vote from two successive angles that reveal the editorial duplicity of the Turkish press. Daily Sabah, close to the Erdoğan government, opens with the formula "Colombians choose between war and peace" — the opposition is without nuance: Cepeda represents dialogue, De la Espriella the "all-out war." The paper gives the figures: 41 million voters, 408,000 deployed security forces, 122,020 polling tables, a bomb attack in Cauca in late April that killed 21 civilians. Daily Sabah quotes Wilmer Bolivar, a "47-year-old ex-soldier": "What De la Espriella wants is to put the house in order." Kemalist Turkey recognizes this grammar and transmits it without criticism.

Bianet (left, based in Istanbul) then shifts to the institutional episode with rare precision. The newspaper translates the entirety of Petro's declaration into Turkish: "the algorithms of the counting and audit software have been modified three times in one week" — a sentence that appears in no Anglo or French media. Bianet documents the identification of the "Bautista brothers" as owners of Thomas Greg & Sons, contractors for logistics, passport and counting-system tenders. Turkish precision on this point is meticulous — the Turkish experience of electoral disputes (Istanbul 2019, Supreme Electoral Council) resonates throughout the coverage.

It is, however, the last part of Bianet's coverage that reveals an unprecedented angle: the literal translation of De la Espriella's appeal to the United States. "Let the US closely follow this second round" — a sentence that appears in no Western media, places Washington explicitly as the external guarantor of a Colombian national vote — a gesture that shocks the Turkish sensitivity hostile to any American interference, but which Bianet reproduces as is for its Kemalist-left readership. Ankara watches a Latin American nation asking to be supervised by Washington with the same surprise it would watch Cyprus asking for London's supervision.