Recep Tayyip Erdogan, current president of Turkey, secured victory in the second round of presidential elections held this Sunday (28), when 54.60% of the votes had been counted, according to official sources.
At the time of the count, Erdogan had 54.47% of the vote to Social Democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s 45.58%, said Ahmet Yener, chairman of Turkey’s YSK election commission.
This percentage of votes makes Erdogan the virtual winner of the elections, according to official sources. Shortly before, the official Turkish news agency Anadolu had reported that Erdogan was leading the poll with 52.7% of the votes, against 47.3% for Kiliçdaroglu, and the private agency ANKA it also projected the current president in the lead, albeit with a more balanced result.
After the numbers were released, Hungary’s ultranationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán congratulated Erdogan on his “unquestionable” victory. “Congratulations to President Erdogan on his undisputed election victory,” Orbán wrote on Twitter.
More than an hour before the announcement, when it was still not known who had won, the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, had already congratulated Erdogan “on his victory” in the election.
On May 14, in the first round, none of the candidates obtained the majority needed to become head of state. That day, Erdogan won 49.5% of the vote against Kiliçdaroglu’s 44.9%.
The polls were open for nine hours this Sunday, between 8am and 5pm (local time; 2am and 11am in Brasilia), so that about 61 million people could vote.
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