ISTANBUL – Turkiye voted Sunday in a historic runoff in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered as the overwhelming favorite to extend his Islamic-rooted rule beyond 2028.
The NATO member’s longest-serving leader confounded detractors and doubters by cruising to a clear first-round victory over secular rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu on May 14.
Nonetheless, the vote was the most difficult Erdogan has faced in one of the country’s most transformational moments since its establishment as a post-Ottoman republic 100 years ago, resulting in the country’s first-ever presidential runoff.
Kilicdaroglu cobbled together a formidable coalition of Erdogan’s disillusioned former supporters, secular nationalists, and religious conservatives.
Opposition supporters saw it as a last-ditch effort to keep Turkiye from becoming an autocracy under a leader whose consolidation of power rivaled that of Ottoman sultans.
Despite this, Erdogan, 69, came within a fraction of a percentage point of winning the first round outright.
His victory came in the midst of one of the world’s biggest cost-of-living crises, and practically every poll predicted his defeat.
“I’m voting for Erdogan.” “There is no one else like him,” Emir Bilgin, 24, said in an Istanbul working-class neighbourhood where the future president grew up playing street football.
Kilicdaroglu emerged from the first round a changed man.
The former civil servant’s old rhetoric of social togetherness and democracy lost place to desk-thumping remarks about the need to deport migrants and confront terrorism promptly.
His rightward shift was aimed for nationalists, who were significant winners in the parallel parliamentary elections.
The 74-year-old has long supported Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the military commander who founded both Turkiye and Kilicdaroglu’s secular CHP party.
However, these had taken a back seat to his promotion of socially liberal ideas held by younger people and city dwellers.
Analysts are skeptical about Kilicdaroglu’s gambit.
Source: AFP
