Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu vowed on Thursday to expel millions of migrants and send them home, seeking the support of hardline nationalists who helped push last weekend's presidential election into a second term.
Kılıçdaroğlu, 74, the candidate of the six-party opposition alliance, won 6 percent of the vote in Sunday's ballot, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 45, received 69.49 percent, slightly short of the majority needed to avoid a run-off.
Kılıçdaroğlu attacked his rival in the presidential race, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying: "The borders and the honour of the country have not been protected. It deliberately brought more than 10 million refugees into this country. Once in power, I will send all refugees home."
Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Kılıçdaroğlu said that if current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected, another 10 million asylum seekers would arrive in Turkey.
The secular leader has long issued anti-immigrant statements, but only made his final pledge to repatriate them after finishing second to Erdogan in the first round of the May 14 presidential election.
Kılıçdaroğlu urgently needs to win the votes of nationalist supporters of the losing candidate in the first round Sinan Ogan, who finished third and will not participate in the run-off.
Sinan, a far-right who won 5.2 percent of the vote, has previously indicated that he would only support a candidate who carries out a security crackdown on migrants and fights "terrorism," the term used in Turkey when talking about Kurdish fighters.
It was unclear whether Ogan could succeed in mobilizing his more than 2.8 million voters to support which of the candidates he would support.
According to pollster Ozer Senkar, most of Ogan's voters may eventually turn to incumbent President Erdogan regardless of who Ogan supports. In the run-off, a simple majority above 50% is sufficient to win the election.
According to UN data, there are 3.9 million refugees in Turkey, including refugees from neighboring Syria, but the Turkish government puts the figure at around 4 million, many of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Kılıçdaroğlu does not provide any data to support his claim that the country is home to 10 million refugees.
"Such high and politically sensitive figures are highly speculative" figures that are difficult to prove, dpa news agency dpa quoted political analyst and migration researcher Murat Erdoğan as saying, adding that the exact number of irregular migrants in Turkey is unclear.
He said inflammatory rhetoric would only help Kılıçdaroğlu garner only an additional 1 percent of the vote.
Turks consider migrants among the three main issues of the current election, according to opinion polls. More than 85 percent want Syrian refugees to leave, says migration researcher Murat Erdogan.