Turkey’s Erdogan faces second round in fevered race for presidency

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

About a million Turkish expats have voted in the presidential election, with turnout highest amongst those living in Germany, Canada, and the US, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency.

The Supreme Election Council says the increase in votes overseas is part of what has delayed the vote counting.

The agency says support for Erdogan was high in northern Africa and parts of western Europe, while the Americas and Oceania backed Kilicdaroglu.

The Supreme Election Council says the increase in votes overseas is part of what has delayed the vote counting.

It was a very long night - it was tense. This morning it still feels tense, because there is no clear result, and people in general wanted this to end in the first round.

Another two weeks of a tense atmosphere - they didn't want to take it, especially the opposition supporters.

They are disappointed, because the opinion polls showed that Kilicdaroglu could actually secure the presidency in the first round.

Two recent polls showed he could get more than 50% of the votes, so expectation was high.

They actually felt power was within their grasp, and this was new for them.

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

In the run up to the election, Turkey's President Erdogan still had widespread support but his domestic problems had been piling up and he was up against his strongest contender since he first led Turkey 20 years ago.

Increasing numbers of Turks blame him for inflation, currently at 44%, and for his government’s slow response to the twin earthquakes last February.

He still has the charisma, but his main rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is promising to unify a polarised country.

Erdogan has steadily increased his powers from being prime minister in 2003 to elected president in 2014.

But it was in 2017 that he extended his powers still further, scrapping the role of prime minister and becoming executive president in response to a failed coup.

He runs the country from a vast palace with much of the media controlled by allies, while his rival promises a new start and an end to strongman rule.

• Read more here.

It's been a drama-filled night as people gathered around Turkey to watch the results come in.

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

More than 12 hours after the polls closed in Turkey and with more than 90% of the vote counted, the presidential election result is still not clear.

• Preliminary results show neither President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor his main rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu appear to have secured the majority of votes needed to win
• Final results haven't been released, but a run-off vote appears likely
• Erdogan - who has held power since 2002 - is ahead with 49.49% of the vote and has told his AK Party supporters he believes he can still win outright
• Meanwhile Kilicdaroglu - who has collected 44.79% so far - has vowed to win the election in a second round
• However the AK Party's alliance is expected to form a majority in parliament

• It is Turkey's tightest election in years, and comes as the country grapples with high inflation and recovers from devastating earthquakes earlier this year.

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former commander in the Ottoman army, founded the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923 based on a strict secular rule, a difficult task for a traditionally conservative society.

Since then, the army has toppled four different governments which they saw as a threat to secularism.

For decades, the conservative portion of the country, devoted to Islamic values, felt a strong sense of oppression from the state.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who himself went to jail for threatening the secular state in 1999, has very slowly changed this strict secular rule since he came to power in 2003.

And he has gained something like unconditional support from the conservative sections of society.

As he strengthened his position, he imposed more religious laws, as well as granting himself more authority.

He was first prime minister, then became president in 2014, reacting to a failed 2016 coup by dramatically increasing his powers.

After 20 years at the head of the nation, some have called him Turkey’s most powerful leader since Ataturk.

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

Sixty-four million Turks were eligible to cast their vote in these elections - and five million of those were first-time voters, aged between 18 and 22.

Erdogan and his AK Party have ruled the country since 2002, so these young voters haven’t known any other party in power in their lifetime.

In the decade before 2002, Turkey was ruled by coalition governments which tended to change with elections every two to three years.

So what will young voters – who may not care about the political problems of the past – decide? Credible opinion polls in Turkey suggest around 70% of them don't trust the AK Party with their future.

Read more here about young voters in Turkey and what they want.

For hundreds of years, the Ottoman Empire dominated what are now around 50 sovereign countries. However, starting in the 18th Century, the once-mighty empire entered a long and steady state of decline. Gradually digesting their state’s weaknesses in comparison to Europe, generations of Ottoman sultans started to borrow institutions, laws, and traditions from the great powers in Europe in order to revive Ottoman greatness.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, furthered this model, by reformatting the country in his own image as a secular, West-facing and European society. Copying European states - the global powers of the inter-war era - in statecraft, he aimed to place Turkey on a trajectory that would eventually revive the country’s great nation status.

Enter Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who since 2003 has tried to reshape the country in his own image as socially conservative, politically Islamist and Middle Eastern. His ultimate goal: reviving Turkey’s great power status. However, his pursuit for greatness for Turkey is not unusual. In many ways, it aligns with the longstanding policies that have shaped his country’s former leaders, from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk.

However, Erdogan’s path is different compared to his predecessors. While the others folded Turkey under the West and copied Europe to restore its global influence, Erdogan has picked an unorthodox model: his goal is to make Turkey great as a standalone power first, in the Middle East, and then globally.

In the end, Turkey is both European and Middle Eastern, and I believe that it will eventually settle somewhere in between Ataturk’s and Erdogan’s visions, embracing its non-exclusive identities: European and Middle Eastern, secular and Islamic, West and East.

EPACopyright: EPA

Turkish voters didn’t only vote to pick a new president today, they also voted to fill 600 seats in parliament.

Erdogan’s AK Party (AKP) has garnered the most votes, but it didn’t do as well as its leader did.

AKP received 35% of the votes, with more than 96% of the votes counted, according to state news agency AA. This is AKP's worst score since it was first voted in back in 2002 when it got 34.28% of the votes.

Since then, the party has never polled less than 40% of the votes.

We can also see the number of their seats in parliament has decreased since then. In 2002, AKP won 363 seats. Since then, even though their numbers dropped in every election, the party has never had fewer than 300 seats.

In the 2018 elections, that number went down to 295.

Today's results, with 35% of the votes, suggest AKP will have 267 MPs, losing 28 seats.

But through its alliance with three other parties, it is expected to win another 56 seats. That would give Erdogan’s alliance a majority in parliament with 323 seats.

Back in the 2018 election, his alliance won 344 seats.

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

The third candidate in the presidential election, Sinan Ogan, who garnered around 5% of the votes according to both Turkish news agencies, has said his bid for the presidency changed the outcome of the vote.

It’s not official yet but echoing Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kemal Kilicdaroglu's statements earlier, Ogan said a second round was likely to be held.

If that becomes official, Ogan won’t be in the running for it - and his decision on who he will ask his supporters to back might make a big difference.

He says he will decide on this in a few days' time: “I will speak to the leaders in my alliance, I will go and ask my voters in the coming couple of days. And then we will make a decision and perform our duty in the next 14 days.”

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

Some 11 cities were severely affected by the February earthquakes in Turkey, and in those areas the government was criticised for not responding quickly.

Eight of these cities are AKP and Erdogan strongholds, where the president received more than 60% of the vote in the last two presidential elections.

According to preliminary results, votes in the area have not changed dramatically.

His share of votes has decreased by 2-3% in five of those cities, while in three others, his support has remained unchanged from what it was in the 2018 presidential elections.

Except for Gaziantep, where he received more than 59% of the votes, his support didn't fall below 60% in any of those cities.

More than 50,000 people died in the two February earthquakes and millions more were left homeless.

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has just given a speech alongside the leaders of the parties in the Nation's Alliance, also known as the Table of Six - the main opposition alliance.

He said he didn't oppose the preliminary results, but didn't give any details of numbers and did not claim to be the front-runner.

Instead, he said: "We will win these elections in the second round," accepting that there would be a second round in two weeks' time.

He also said they wouldn't let them be a "fait accompli," adding "an election cannot be won on a balcony" as a reference to Erdogan's earlier balcony speech where the president said he believed he had won.

In what was again a very short speech, Kilicdaroglu also said Erdogan and his AK Party couldn't get the result they expected:

"Erdogan didn't get the vote of confidence from the people. The desire to change in the society is more than 50%."

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

We are hearing more from President Erdogan.

He calls on AK Party officials to keep monitoring the counting of the rest of the votes.

"We don't know if the elections are over in the first round. If our nation choses to go to a second round, we will respect that too. But we believe that we will finish this round with more than 50% of the votes, there are still votes to count."

He also thanked his voters for giving a majority to the People's Alliance in the parliament.

The alliance includes his AKP, the ultra-nationalist MHP along with nationalist and Islamist parties.

Twitter/AKPCopyright: Twitter/AKP

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has addressed his supporters from the balcony of his AK Party headquarters in Ankara, and started off by singing a love song for his supporters waiting for him.

He then started his speech by saying: "Someone is in the kitchen, we are in the balcony," as a reference to his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu who has published videos from his modest kitchen during the election campaign.

He continued: "Even though the final results are not in, we are far ahead. We still don’t know the final official results, we are still waiting for the will of the nation to become apparent. While we were waiting for the results, I decided to give the traditional balcony speech in advance."

That seems to be a clear suggestion that he might not win the first round, but that he believes he will win in the second round.

He also said: "Our nation has made its decision. You don't need to find new excuses. We will see our nation's will when we will have the final results."

Erdogan has previously given a "balcony speech" from the same spot after every election he has won.

He appeared to have already started to campaign for the second round, using the fact he came ahead of Kilicdaroglu, after more than 90% of the votes counted.

The head of the Supreme Election Council, Ahmet Yener, has now said that 87.13% of the votes have been counted.

Asked by a journalist whether he could give the results so far, Yener looked at him silently and walked back into the council building.

We are expecting him to give the final result when all the votes have been counted.

We still don't know when this will happen.

Getty ImagesCopyright: Getty Images

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has arrived in Ankara, where his AK Party's headquarters is based.

When his plane landed at the airport, the party's official Twitter account posted a video of party supporters waving flags in front of the party headquarters, saying: "The balcony is ready, the nation awaits its leader."

Erdogan has previously given a speech from the balcony of AKP HQ whenever he's won an election - which has been almost every election since 2002.

The tweet suggests he will give a speech again tonight, even though the final results haven't come in yet.

So far, he is the front-runner with less than 50% of the votes, which is the threshold needed to win in the first round.

Now more than 95% of the ballot boxes are counted, according to both major news agencies.

The state agency AA says Erdogan has 49.52% of the votes, Kilicdaroglu follows with 44.76%.

Anka gives a similar number: Erdogan has 49.29% so far while Kilicdaroglu has 45.01%.

As we've been reporting, if neither man can secure 50%, there will be a run-off second round.

There are, however, still a few million votes to be counted.

We are expecting to hear the final results from the Supreme Election Council, but we don't know when that will happen. Stay tuned.