Turkey hangs in the balance after 20 years of Erdogan in power. According to the official count, the president is ahead but in the evening, with more than 90% of the ballots counted, he fell below the 50% of the votes needed to be elected in the first round, thus bringing the possibility of a run-off in two weeks closer. However, challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, with 44.4%, denounced “a farce” in progress: “We have the advantage – he wrote on Twitter -. We will not sleep tonight, my people”. In fact, the gap between the two has gradually decreased with the passing of the hours. The first data after closed polls indicated Erdogan over 58% of the preferences, but the accusation of the opposition is that the votes of the traditional strongholds of the president were counted and transmitted first. Sinan Ogan, candidate of a coalition of small far-right parties, was however relegated to just over 5% of the votes after an electoral campaign entirely based on the attack of Syrian migrants who arrived in Turkey after the start of the civil conflict in the country. about 4 million people. Kilicdaroglu, leader of the secular center-left CHP party, triumphed in much of the Kurdish-majority south-east of the country, but Erdogan confirmed himself in the countryside and in his central fiefdoms. Despite the disadvantage, the opposition has repeatedly claimed to be in the lead, expressing heavy criticism of the Anadolu agency, which has already ended up at the center of scandals in past electoral appointments and accused several times of not disclosing data when they were unfavorable for the Sultan.
Polling stations open in Turkey, parliamentary and presidential elections underway
According to the independent agency Anka, close to the opposition, the numbers would be different, with Kilicdaroglu ahead. Only during the night will the definitive result of the most important elections of Erdogan’s career and for Turkey in general become clear but the incumbent president can already look with certainty at a good result at the parliamentary level, where his coalition is first for now with more than 50% of the votes, a figure that would allow it to have a majority in the assembly. If this is confirmed, the victory of Erdogan’s coalition will be destined to weigh heavily in the coming weeks in the event of a runoff on May 28th. The only certain fact, however, is that the Turks went en masse to vote with a turnout that came close to 90% of those entitled. According to the Supreme Electoral Council of Ankara, the voting operations were carried out without irregularities.
Very long lines were seen at the polling stations in all the cities, between Erdogan’s supporters convinced of renewing their trust in the Sultan and opponents for whom today’s vote represented “a matter of life and death”. According to them, a confirmation from Erdogan would forever put an end to the independence of the judiciary, deal a lethal blow to human rights and bring Turkey to the brink of the abyss from an economic point of view. “I hope tonight there are benefits for Turkish democracy”, the president had said after voting in the Uskudar district, on the Asian side of Istanbul. After going to the polls, where he presented himself with his wife Emine distributing cash to children, the Turkish president left for Ankara to follow the counting. “Everyone missed democracy. We missed being together, we missed hugging each other. You will see, spring will come back to this country if God wills and it will last forever”instead were the words of Kilicdaroglu who voted in the capital, where on Saturday he went to pay homage to the mausoleum of the father of the secular Republic of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to close the electoral campaign while Erdogan was instead resumed praying in Hagia Sophia, which in 2021 it decided to convert it into a mosque, as happened at the time of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
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