After almost all votes were counted, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s share of the vote fell just short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win, while opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who was projected by opinion polls to win, managed to garner 45 percent of the ballots.
Erdogan, 69, has indicated he will accept the will of the people if there is a runoff election on May 28. Kilicdaroglu, 74, his biggest contender in Sunday’s elections, conceded that a run-off was imminent.
The incumbent, who was facing the toughest challenge to his 20-year reign, claimed he was still in with a chance of victory in the first round of voting. With over 99 percent of votes tabulated, he received 49.4 percent of the total.
We have no idea if the elections were decided in the first or second round. Early on Monday, Erdogan indicated that ballots from Turkish people living abroad still need to be counted, so he wouldn’t be surprised if the election went to a second round. In 2018, he received sixty percent of the votes cast from abroad.
“We are already ahead of our closest rival by 2.6 million votes,” Erdogan stated in Ankara, the nation’s capital. We anticipate an uptick once the official findings are in.
“Surprisingly unexpected findings”
Kilicdaroglu told reporters early on Monday that he was optimistic about the possibility of a runoff.
“If our nation says second round, we will absolutely win in the second round,” he vowed. More than half of people in our country want things to change for the better.
The quakes in February that killed more than 50,000 people dominated the election debates this year.
The third contender in the campaign, “anti-refugee and anti-immigrant” Sinan Ogan, is doing surprisingly well, according to Sonar Cagaptay, a senior scholar at the Washington Institute.
“Erdogan pulling some 3 percentage points ahead or more,… that’s surprising,” he stated from Ankara. Even more unexpected was the appearance of a third contender in the polls. His vote total wasn’t huge, but it was high enough for him to be a spoiler.
Cagaptay predicted that both leading candidates would have to pursue 55-year-old Ogan in order to win in the second round, which appears to be inevitable at this point.
Once a member of an ultranationalist group that has subsequently allied themselves with Erdogan, Ogan was ejected. A few time before the election, he decided to join the campaign.
“We will not say if we will support this or that candidate,” Ogan stated on Sunday. We’ll talk to their reps first, then make a call.
From the city of Gaziantep in the country’s center south, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reported that Erdogan has an advantage in the run-off because his alliance secured a majority in parliament.
She said that a parliamentary system rather than a presidential one would be difficult to implement even if the opposition party were to win the runoff election.
Khodr claimed that members of the opposition were dissatisfied with the outcome.
“There are members of the opposition who are disappointed because they felt that Kilicdaroglu was the wrong candidate because he was not able to reach out and chip away the conservative votes from the party,” she said.
Tight competition between Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu,
The Supreme Electoral Board of Turkey, the country’s election authority, has promised to “instantly” release the final tally to all political parties involved in the recount. These estimates are based on reports from Anadolu, Turkey’s official news agency.
The board claimed that the majority of votes from the 3.4 million eligible overseas voters had not yet been counted. It noted that a rematch on May 28 was not guaranteed.
At 93%, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) was leading the People’s Alliance, which was projected to win 324 of the 600 seats in parliament. Kilicdaroglu’s secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) was a part of the six-party opposition alliance known as the Nation Alliance that appeared poised to win 211 seats.
Since 2003, Erdogan has led Turkey in some capacity, first as prime minister and then as president.
The two sides battled accusations as early results trickled in on Sunday evening, with Kilicdaroglu saying his opponents were “blocking” the ballot counting and the ruling AK Party’s spokesman Omer Celik accusing the CHP of sabotage.
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