Türkiye will officially go to a presidential runoff on May 28. This was announced this Monday by the president of the Electoral Commission, Ahmet Yener, who indicated that with the count practically finished, neither candidate managed to exceed 50 percent of the vote.
According to Yener, the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won the first round with 49.5% of the vote. and he will have to face the social democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on the last Sunday of May, to whom preliminary data gives him 45 percent of the ballots.
Both candidates will have to compete in a historic second round after a close election on Sunday.
These are the keys to understanding the recent election day in Türkiye.
1. Türkiye went to the polls in an atmosphere of crisis
This Sundaythe 64 million Turkish voters went to the polls en masse to elect the president and parliament.
In a deeply divided Turkey after two decades of Erdogan in power, the contest to elect the country’s 13th president was a close one. In fact, the candidates in dispute assured, on several occasions, that they could still win in the first round.
On this occasion, President Erdogan came to the vote in a country hit by an economic crisis, with a currency devalued by half in two years and inflation that exceeded 85% in autumn.
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The earthquake on February 6, which collapsed tens of thousands of buildings and caused the death of at least 50,000 people and displaced more than three million, also called into question the administration of the president.
Erdogan has precisely pointed out as one of his great achievements the modernization of Turkey through construction, on which he based his success during his first decade in power, since he was prime minister.
However, the earthquake revealed the corruption of contractors and authorities, who granted construction permits that did not comply with anti-seismic regulations. What ended up costing the current president.
On the contrary, his rival Kemal Kiliçdaroglu is committed to appeasement and promised during his campaign to restore the rule of law and respect the institutions, affected in the last ten years by Erdogan’s autocratic drift.
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2. Erdogan loses his majority, but still prevails again
According to the Electoral Commission, Erdogan won the first round with 49.5% of the vote and Social Democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu came in second with 45 percent.
The barely 35,000 votes that remain to be counted will not give a majority to either of the two candidates.
But despite the fact that Erdogan lost with this result the absolute majority that he obtained in the 2014 election and that he revalidated in 2018, the support he received is well above what the polls predicted.
The new victory of the current president of Turkey was built, above all, with the support that he continues to receive in the interior provinces of the country, the vote abroad and from the most nationalist and Islamist sectors.
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Erdogan, who has been in power for 20 years, won 51 of the country’s 81 provinces, essentially from Anatolia and inland areas. The president lost in Ankara, where the capital is, and in the southeast bordering Syria, Iraq and Iran, where the Kurdish population is concentrated.
Also contributing to Erdogan’s victory was the support of Turks living abroad, where the provisional count gives him 56% of the support. Erdogan wins in all North African countries and in Central Europe.
On the contrary, the vote distribution maps show that almost the entire coastal strip of the country, from Istanbul to the Mediterranean, supported Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. It is here where a good part of the country’s tourism industry and large cities such as Izmir or Antalya are concentrated.
The opposition also wins in America and countries like Italy or Spain, where Kiliçdaroglu obtains 82%
Regarding Parliament, in the preliminary count of the votes for the parliamentary elections, Erdogan’s ruling AKP party, and its ultranationalist and Islamist allies, lost 22 seats, but maintains a majority of 322 in a Parliament with 600 deputies.
Kiliçdaroglu’s party, the social democrat CHP, and its nationalist allies will have 213 seats, and the leftist, pro-Kurdish HDP party and its partners would get 65, according to the still unofficial ballot.
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3. Accusations of ‘manipulation’ took the day
Until late at night, both sides fought a battle of figures, urging their respective observers to stay in the vote counting places “until the end”.
Kiliçdaroglu’s side did not take long to refute the first figures, which gave Erdogan a comfortable advantage, stating that the results of the most favorable polling stations for the opposition candidate had not yet been counted due to the multiple appeals presented, which slowed down the counting. .
In the evening, the social democrat CHP, the main Turkish opposition party, denounced that in the election there was a “manipulation” in the dissemination of the results.
4. The third candidate who will be key to the second round
Now, despite being the clear loser of the presidential elections on Sunday in
Türkiye, Sinan Ogan is emerging as the key to determine who will be the new head of state.
Ogan obtained 5 percent of the votes this Sunday, far behind the 49.4% of the current president and 45% of the leader of the opposition.
But who Ogan’s nearly three million votes go to may determine whether Erdogan extends his two decades in power. or if there is a radical change in Turkish politics.
Ogan has already put the price of his support on the table. He will recommend his supporters to vote for the candidate who will ensure the outlawing of the HDP, the leftist party that defends the rights of the Kurdish minority.
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Erdogan has put that formation, which in the parliamentary elections consolidated itself as a third force, on the brink of outlawing. The Turkish government considers it the political arm of the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla group considered a terrorist by the European Union.
But it is more difficult for Kiliçdaroglu to distance himself from the HDP, since he needs to maintain the support it has given him in the presidential elections.
Without the 4.7 million HDP votes, Kiliçdaroglu will have no chance of winning in the second round.
The truth is that it is not clear if Ogan will be able to direct the vote of all his followers. Among them there are voters in whom the nationalist element weighs more, closer to Erdogan, but also secularists, opposed to the president’s Islamism.
ANGIE RUIZ HURTADO
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With agencies
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