After a confusing and nerve-wracking election night, Turkey woke up Monday morning with no final presidential election results. However, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did significantly better than expected, much to the disappointment of the opposition.
More than twelve hours after the polls closed, and with more than 90 percent of the votes counted, both President Erdogan and his challenger Kemal Kiliçdaroglu do not have enough votes to win. Erdogan got stuck at 49.3 percent and Kiliçdaroglu at 45 percent. A decisive second round on May 28 is likely. Kingmaker is the nationalist presidential candidate Sinan Ogan, who received more than 5 percent of the vote.
The results show a very polarized country, where the identitarian and ideological dividing lines are deeply entrenched. Erdogan fared much better than most pre-election polls predicted. They suggested that Kiliçdaroglu could win in the first round. But Erdogan’s extremely negative and polarizing campaign seems to have paid off. His AK party and its ultra-nationalist ally MHP managed to retain a narrow majority of more than 49 percent in the parliamentary elections, for which there is only one round of elections. The opposition alliance got stuck at 35 percent, and with the support of the pro-Kurdish party, it has 45 percent of the vote.
When Erdogan addressed tens of thousands of supporters at his AK party headquarters in Ankara on Sunday night, he sounded confident and combative. He said a second round would not change the result. “The fact that the election results are not yet final does not change the fact that the nation has elected us,” Erdogan said in his speech. “We have won a majority in parliament, and we control the institutions therein.” The president called on voters to vote for him in the second round for the sake of the country’s stability and governability.
Disappointing evening
The opposition had a disappointing night, accusing the AKP and state news agency Anadolu of manipulating the results. After Erdogan addressed his supporters, Kiliçdaroglu also issued a short statement. He said the elections are not decided by speeches from balconies, he warned of being presented with a fait accompli, and said the results are still coming in. That is why he called on all election observers not to leave the polling stations. “If it is a second round, we will definitely win it,” said Kiliçdaroglu.
This brought an end to a surreal evening, in which it once again became clear how enormously divided Turkey is. Because during the counting of the votes, the state news agency Anadolu and the private news agency ANKA, on which the opposition relied, came up with completely different results. While Anadolu reported that Erdogan was ahead of his rival by 10 percentage points, ANKA reported a small lead for Kiliçdaroglu. In addition, many other figures were circulating on social media, which were distributed by journalists with their own sources at the Supreme Electoral Council.
This led to much confusion. Especially after the opposition mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, gave a joint press conference in which they questioned Anadolu’s results. According to the opposition, the AKP manipulated the results by appealing against all polling stations where Kiliçdaroglu received the most votes. Those votes then have to be counted again, making it look like Erdogan is ahead. But many results from opposition districts in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir have yet to come in.
Directed
As with previous elections, the results came out in a very staged manner. At the beginning of the evening, Erdogan started with 58 percent of the vote. But that percentage dropped steadily, stuck at 50.01 for a long time, and then dropped further, necessitating a second round. Also noteworthy was that Ogan remained at 5.3 percent throughout the evening and night. The predicted increase in opposition votes at the end of the night failed to materialise.
“If the government is seriously manipulating, why hasn’t the opposition released its own data and appealed to the Supreme Electoral Council?” tweeted Berk Esen, a political scientist at Bilkent University in Ankara, who is close to the opposition. stands. “If the allegation is true, but the opposition has no data, then what happened to the promises of ballot box security?” The opposition had a large network of election observers who oversaw the counting of votes. “If the accusation is not true, then the situation is even worse.”
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The opposition therefore woke up on Monday with a big hangover. Because many secular Turks had expected a better result for Kiliçdaroglu. Erdogan has conducted a highly polarizing campaign, depicting all opposition parties as champions of LGBT rights, backed by the Kurdish terror group PKK and by Western superpowers seeking to thwart Turkey’s advance. In addition, he used all state resources to maintain the support of inflation-stricken voters. For example, he raised wages and pensions on several occasions, canceled part of the student debts, and paid citizens’ electricity and gas bills.
Optimistic campaign
Despite this, Erdogan failed to decide the presidential elections in the first round. That is a merit of Kiliçdaroglu, who united six very different parties. He ran an optimistic and inclusive campaign, avoiding identity politics and focusing on citizens’ economic problems. He promised to restore democracy and the economy. It turned out to be not enough to break through the social fault lines between left and right, secular and religious. In the southern cities hardest hit by the quake, Erdogan received nearly the same percentage of votes as in 2018.
The majority of the AKP and the MHP in parliament, and the distrust and frustration of the opposition over the election results, give Erdogan a psychological advantage in the second round. It is crucially important what kingmaker Ogan will do, because his supporters can vote for both Erdogan and Kiliçdaroglu. He said in a speech that he will support the party that takes strong action against terrorism and returns Syrian refugees. The former could pose a problem for the opposition, which is backed by a pro-Kurdish party seen by nationalists as an extension of the PKK. The second is difficult for Erdogan, who said during the campaign that sending Syrians back “is not humane and not Islamic”.