ANKARA: Turkey’s presidential election runoff began on Sunday as Recep Tayyip Erdogan may win and continue with increasingly authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, and unconventional economic governance.
Erdogan, 69, defied expectations and won the first round of voting on May 14 with a comfortable lead of about five points over his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu. But in the previous contest that had significant ramifications for Turkish geopolitics and international politics, he came up just short of the required 50% to avoid a runoff.
Erdogan’s unexpectedly strong showing amid a deep cost of living crisis and a win in parliamentary polls for a coalition of his conservative Islamist-rooted AK Party (AKP) with backing of the nationalist MHP and others, buoyed the veteran campaigner who said a vote for him was a vote for stability.
The election would decide not only who leads Turkey, a NATO-member country of 85 million, but also how it was governed, where its economy was headed after its currency plunged to one-tenth of its value against the US dollar in a decade, and the shape of its foreign policy, which had seen Turkey irk the West by cultivating relations with Russia and Gulf countries.
Voting started at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) and would end at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT). The outcome was expected to start becoming clear by early evening on Monay.
Kilicdaroglu, 74, was the candidate of a six-party opposition alliance and leads the Republican People’s Party (CHP) fashioned by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. His camp had struggled to regain impetus after trailing Erdogan in the first round of polls.
The initial polls showed larger-than-expected support for nationalism – a powerful force in Turkish politics which had been in hostilities with Kurdish militants, an attempted coup in 2016 and the influx of millions of refugees from Syria since the war started there in 2011.
According to Interior Ministry data, the country is the world’s largest host of refugees, with some 5 million migrants, of whom 3.3 million were Syrians.
Sinan Ogan, a third-place presidential candidate and hardline nationalist, said earlier that he endorsed Erdogan based on the presumption of “non-stop struggle (against) terrorism”, which he referred to pro-Kurdish groups. He achieved 5.17 per ent of the vote in the first round of polls.
Umit Ozdag, another nationalist and leader of the anti-immigrant Victory Party (ZP), proclaimed a deal declaring ZP’s support for Kilicdaroglu after he said he would repatriate refuges and immigrants. The ZP won 2.2 per cent of the votes in the first round of parliamentary election.
A closely-watched survey by pollster Konda for the runoff put support for Erdogan at 52.7 per cent and Kilicdaroglu at 47.3 per cent after distributing undecided voters. The survey was conducted on May 20-21 before Ogan and Ozdag disclosed their endorsements.
Another key was how Turkey’s Kurds, about a fifth of the population, would vote in the runoff.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) party endorsed Kilicdaroglu in the first round but after his lurch to the right to win nationalist votes, it did not explicitly name him and urged voters rather to reject Erdogan’s “one-man regime” in the runoff.
