Global Courant 2023-05-15 18:47:19
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s presidential election will be decided in a second round, election officials said Monday, after incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept ahead of his main challenger but failed to win an outright victory that would extend his increasingly authoritarian rule to a third decade.
The second round of voting on May 28 will determine whether the strategically located NATO country remains in the president’s tight grip or can take a more democratic path as promised by its main rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
Although Erdogan has been in power for 20 years, opinion polls suggested that the election battle could be drawing to a close and that a cost-of-living crisis and criticism of the government’s response to a devastating earthquake in February could redraw the electoral map.
Instead, Erdogan’s withdrawal was still less pronounced than predicted — and with his alliance retaining its grip on parliament, he is now in a good position to win in the second round.
Uncertainty drove Turkey’s major exchange BIST-100 more than 6% lower on Monday open, leading to a temporary halt in trading. But shares rallied after trading resumed and the index was down 2.5% in the afternoon compared to Friday’s closing price.
Western countries and foreign investors were particularly interested in the outcome because of Erdogan’s unorthodox leadership of the economy and often spry but successful attempts to put Turkey at the center of many major diplomatic negotiations. At a crossroads between East and West, with a coast along the Black Sea and bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria, Turkey has been a key player in issues such as the war in Syria, migration flows to Europe, Ukraine’s grain exports and the extension.
Preliminary results showed Erdogan winning 49.5% of the vote, while Kilicdaroglu received 44.9% and the third candidate, Sinan Ogan, 5.2%, according to Ahmet Yener, the head of the Supreme Electoral Council.
The remaining uncounted votes were not enough to lead Erdogan to outright victory, even if they all broke for him, Yener said. In the last presidential election in 2018, Erdogan won in the first round with more than 52% of the vote.
Even as it became clear that a runoff was likely, Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey as prime minister or president since 2003, described Sunday’s vote as a victory for both himself and the country.
“The fact that the election results are not yet final does not change the fact that the nation has elected us,” 69-year-old Erdogan told his supporters in the early hours of Monday.
He said he would respect the country’s decision.
Kilicdaroglu sounded hopeful, tweeting around the time the second round was announced: “Don’t give up hope… We will stand up and win this election together.”
Kilicdaroglu, 74, and his party have lost all previous presidential and parliamentary elections since coming to power in 2010, but this time they received more votes.
Right-wing candidate Ogan has not said who he would support if the election goes to a second round. He is believed to have gained support from nationalist voters who wanted change after two decades under Erdogan but were unconvinced by the ability of the Kilicdaroglu-led six-party alliance to govern.
The election results showed that the alliance led by Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party looks set to retain its majority in the 600-seat parliament, though the assembly has lost much of its power following a referendum that gave the presidency additional legislative powers that narrowly lost. were adopted in 2017.
Erdogan’s AKP and its allies won 321 seats in the National Assembly, while the opposition won 213 and the 66 remaining went to a pro-Kurdish alliance, according to preliminary results.
Howard Eissenstat, an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at St. Lawrence University in New York, said these results would likely give Erdogan an advantage in an eventual runoff because voters would not want a “divided government.”
As in previous years, Erdogan led a very divisive campaign. He portrayed Kilicdaroglu, who had gained the support of the country’s pro-Kurdish party, colluding with “terrorists” and supporting what he called “deviant” LGBTQ rights. In an effort to win over inflation-stricken voters, he raised wages and pensions and subsidized electricity and gas bills, while spotlighting Turkey’s defense industry and homegrown infrastructure projects.
Kilicdaroglu, for his part, campaigned on promises to reverse crackdowns on free speech and other forms of democratic decline, and to restore an economy battered by high inflation and currency devaluation.
But when the results came in, it turned out that those elements didn’t wake up voters as expected: Turkey’s conservative heartland voted overwhelmingly for the ruling party, with Kilicdaroglu’s main opposition winning most of the coastal provinces in the west and south. The pro-Kurdish Green Left Party, YSP, won the predominantly Kurdish provinces in the southeast.
Results reported by the state-run Anadolu Agency showed that Erdogan’s party dominates in the quake-hit region, winning 10 of 11 provinces in an area that has traditionally supported the president. That was despite criticism of his government’s slow response to the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people.
Nearly 89% of eligible voters in Turkey cast a ballot and more than half of foreign voters went to the polls. Voter turnout in Turkey is traditionally high, despite the government’s crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly over the years, especially since an attempted coup in 2016.
Erdogan blamed the failed coup on followers of a former ally, the cleric Fethullah Gülen, and launched a massive crackdown on officials allegedly associated with Gülen and against pro-Kurdish politicians.
Critics argue the president’s heavy-handed style is responsible for a painful cost-of-living crisis. According to the latest official statistics, inflation is about 44%, down from a high of about 86%. The price of vegetables became a campaign theme for the opposition, which used an onion as its symbol.
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Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul. Associated Press writer Cinar Kiper contributed from Bodrum, Turkey.
