Türkiye sees neck and neck race for presidency

ANKARA

Türkiye has seen one of its most exciting presidential elections with the two strongest candidates current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Nation Alliance’s candidate and Republican People’s Party (CHP) Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a neck and neck race.

As of midnight on May 14, both Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu were recorded as having less than the required 50 percent of votes for being elected as the president of Türkiye, according to the Anadolu Agency, which said the turnout was 87.8 percent.

If both candidates fail to secure 50 percent of the votes, the Turks will go to the second round on May 28.

The Anadolu Agency reported that Erdoğan received 49 percent and Kılıçdaroğlu 44 percent of the votes. The third candidate, Sinan Oğan, received 5 percent of the votes. Oğan, in his statement late on May 14, said it is quite likely that the polls will be renewed on May 28.

“It will be the nationalists who will determine the president in the second round, if these polls finish like this. Very difficult 15 days await us,” Oğan said, adding they will decide who to support following internal deliberations.

“It is probable that the polls can go to the run-off,” Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş from the ranks of the CHP said in a statement. But he and Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who briefed the media regularly while the votes were being counted, criticized both the Anadolu Agency and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for manipulating the election results and slowing down the vote counting process.

Yavaş said, according to the official records, Kılıçdaroğlu was having 47.7 percent of the votes and Erdoğan 45.8 percent and that there were more than 8 million votes to be counted and included in the official registration. “They [the AKP] are slowing down the vote counting through a systematic appeal campaign. The votes in some polling stations have been counted multiple times,” Yavaş said.

“They are preparing a pretext for a defeat. They claim victory now but they will be embarrassed when they see the reality. They are building tension,” deputy AKP leader and spokesperson Ömer Çelik said.

AKP deputy leader Ali İhsan Yavuz denied claims by the CHP officials and said they did not appeal in big numbers. “As you know, the [Supreme Election Board] YSK has announced that the deadline for the appeals will end at 3 p.m. on Tuesday [May 16]. We are now assessing all the election processes across the country and we will make our appeals before this deadline,” he said.

Both Çelik and Yavuz argued that Erdoğan was leading the polls for the president and the AKP for the parliament.

In the meantime, both sides repeatedly called on their staff overseeing the counting process not to leave the polling stations before all the procedures are completed.

“I ask all my fellow friends not to leave the polling stations until the results are finalized,” Erdoğan said on Twitter. Kılıçdaroğlu and other leaders of the six-party Nation Alliance issued a similar statement.

Don’t block the process, says Kılıçdaroğlu

In a brief statement, Kılıçdaroğlu criticized the AKP for holding up the vote counting process in a systematic way.

“We will not allow any sort of fait accompli. Stop playing with perception. Let the votes be counted so that the results are finalized. Let’s avoid uncertainty,” he stressed.