Turkey’s President Fails To Win Elections Outright; Second Round Called
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
ISTANBUL (Worthy News) – Turkey’s presidential election is going to a runoff after long-time incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to beat the opposition outright. He defeated his chief rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu but without the 50 percent vote threshold needed to avoid a second round within two weeks.
The 69-year-old Erdogan, whose AK Party is rooted in conservative Islam, “won the first round of the country’s election, scoring 49.51 percent against Kilicdaroglu’s 44.88 percent,” Turkey’s election council said on Monday.
The election comes amid mounting public anger over soaring inflation and the aftermath of devastating earthquakes that killed at least some 50,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria.
However, speaking to supporters in Ankara, the capital, Erdogan, 69, initially said he could still win. But the increasingly authoritarian leader, who ruled Turkey for two decades “, said he would “respect” his nation’s decision if the race went to a runoff vote in two weeks.
“If our nation has chosen for a second round, that is also welcome,” Erdogan said early Monday.
He noted that votes from Turkish citizens living abroad still need to be tallied. He garnered 60 percent of the overseas vote in 2018, but that did not help him this time.
OPPOSITION HOPEFUL
Yet, in a reaction Kilicdaroglu, 74, said that “Despite all of his lies and attacks, Erdogan did not receive the desired outcome.”
No one, he added, “should be enthusiastic about this being a done deal.” He said the “election is not won on the balcony,” referring to Erdogan’s speech venue.
Kilicdaroglu tried to sound confident despite losing the first election round. “We will definitely, definitely win this election in the second round. Everyone will see it. Preliminary results show that Erdogan did not receive the public confidence vote that he expected. The need for a change in society exceeds 50 percent.”
He noted that Erdogan’s AK Party’s loss of votes “demonstrates this too.”
The kingmaker will likely be Sinan Ogan, the third presidential candidate who caught observers watching this election off guard. At the present count, he won well over two million votes, around five percent of ballots cast, and could make a significant difference for the two remaining candidates.
“Muharrem İnce, the wildcard candidate who pulled out before the count, will probably be smacking himself. Ogan gets ready to negotiate with the competing major camps if this goes to a second round,” commented The Guardian newspaper.
The 56-year-old leads a right-wing nationalist coalition called the Ancestral Alliance (ATA), composed of three parties (Zafer party, Adalet party, Ulkem party, and Türkiye İttifakı party).
FLUENT RUSSIAN
He is of ethnic Azeri origin and hails from the eastern Igdir province (where he got only 11 percent of the vote). Ogan studied, obtained a Ph.D. in Moscow, and speaks fluent Russian.
Yet critics say Ogan is unclear on the policies he wants to implement to help Turkey out of economic and political turmoil. However, he has pushed anti-Syrian refugee messages to increase popularity and is staunchly against the PKK, a Kurdish armed group.
The Turkish government has been fighting the PKK since the 1980s, considered a terrorist organization in Ankara and across the European Union.
Yet Turkish voters didn’t only vote to pick a new powerful president; they also voted to fill 600 parliamentary seats. Erdogan’s AKP garnered the most votes, but it didn’t do as well as its leader did.
The AKP received about 35 percent of the votes and will likely have 267 legislators losing 28 seats, official results showed.
This is AKP’s worst score since it was first voted in back in 2002 when it got more than 34 percent, analysts said.