Erdogan wins Turkey's election

High in voters’ concerns is the state of the economy and the damage caused by the earthquake. Even before the February disaster, Turkey was struggling with rising prices and a currency crisis that in October saw inflation hit 85%.

That hit the purchasing power of the public and is “fundamentally the reason why Erdogan’s popularity has been eroded,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and chairman of Istanbul-based think-tank EDAM. “That is going to be the major handicap for Erdogan,” he said.

Voters also cast their ballots based on whom they see as more capable of managing the fallout from the earthquake, as well as shielding the country from future disasters, analysts say, adding that Erdogan’s popularity had not taken the expected political impact.

Apart from the economy and the government’s management of Turkey’s frequent natural disasters, voters are likely concerned with Erdogan’s turn away from democracy – something the opposition campaigned to reverse.

With more than 71% of the votes counted, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to lead challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in today's runoff election, according to preliminary unofficial results from the country's state-run Anadolu news agency.

Here are the latest numbers from Anadolu:

Results published by Anadolu are unofficial. The official result of the election will be published by Turkey's Supreme Election Council.

Turkey has a “special” and growing relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite mounting pressure on Ankara to help bolster Western sanctions against Moscow, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an exclusive interview ahead of the presidential election runoff.

“Russia and Turkey need each other in every field possible,” he added.

Erdogan and his principal rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have diverged on a number of foreign policy issues, including diplomacy with the West and Russia.

Kilicdaroglu has vowed to repair years of strained diplomacy with the West.

He has also said he would not seek to emulate Erdogan’s personality-driven relationship with Putin, and instead recalibrate Ankara’s relationship to Moscow to be “state-driven.”

But in the days leading up to the first round of the presidential race on May 14, Kilicdaroglu sharpened his tone on the Kremlin, accusing it of meddling in Turkey’s election and threatening to rupture the relationship between the two countries.

By contrast, Erdogan has doubled down on his relationship with Putin – and he thinks the West should follow suit. “The West is not leading a very balanced approach,” he told CNN. “You need a balanced approach towards a country such as Russia, which would have been a much more fortunate approach.”

Some background: Turkey, a NATO member that has the alliance’s second-largest army, has strengthened its ties with Russia, and in 2019 even bought weapons from it in defiance of the US. Erdogan has raised eyebrows in the West by continuing to maintain close relations with Russia as it continues its Ukraine onslaught, and has caused a headache for NATO’s expansion plans by stalling the membership of Finland and Sweden.

When the US Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake paid a visit in March to Kilicdaroglu Erdogan lashed out against him, calling the US diplomat’s visit a “shame,” and warning that Turkey needs to “teach the US a lesson in this election.”

Analysts have said that even if Erdogan were to be ousted in the polls, a foreign policy u-turn for Turkey is not a given. While figures close to the opposition have indicated that if victorious, it would reorient Turkey back to the West, others say core foreign policy issues are likely to remain unchanged.

Turkey has, however, also been useful to its Western allies under Erdogan. Last year Ankara helped mediate a landmark grains export deal between Ukraine and Russia, and even provided Ukraine with drones that played a part in countering Russian attacks.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan still believes he’s right, and most of the rest of the world is wrong, when it comes to fighting inflation.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Erdogan promised to continue cutting interest rates to tackle soaring prices if he is re-elected on Sunday.

Investors have already been unnerved by the prospect that he might extend his 20-year rule: Turkish stocks tumbled Monday and the Turkish lira slumped to a new record low against the US dollar.

The currency crashed by more than 40% last year as Erdogan’s economic policies fueled a jump in inflation.

“I have a thesis that interest rates and inflation, they are directly correlated. The lower the interest rates, the lower the inflation will be,” Erdogan told CNN.

As price hikes started to accelerate around the world in late 2021, Erdogan ordered Turkey’s central bank to slash interest rates. The annual rate of consumer price inflation hit 85% last October, before slowing to 44% in April.

“President Erdogan’s unexpectedly strong showing in Turkey’s presidential election on Sunday means that a return to orthodox policymaking looks as far away as ever,” James Reilly, an assistant economist at Capital Economics, said in a note on Monday. “As a consequence, the Turkish lira looks set to remain under serious pressure this year.”

Runaway prices have hurt the Turkish economy as it struggles to recover from a devastating earthquake in February.

“Turkey will need to curb inflation, safeguard financial stability, and put the economy on a path of sustainable growth regardless of the results of the elections,” JPMorgan analysts noted on Monday, adding that the outlook for the country would depend on the extent to which it shifted back toward the economic mainstream. “If policies are shifted to greater orthodoxy, the disinflation process will be faster.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lead slipped slightly in the latest tally of preliminary unofficial election results, the country's state-run Anadolu news agency reported. However, the incumbent remains ahead of rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Here are the latest numbers from Anadolu:

Results published by Anadolu are unofficial. The official result of the election will be published by Turkey's Supreme Election Council.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have an early lead in the Turkish presidential runoff election, according to preliminary early results published by the country's state-run Anadolu news agency.

Erdogan has won 58% of the 35.81% of the vote counted, while his challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has netted 42%. Voter turnout was 84.57%.

Results published by Anadolu are unofficial. The official result of the election will be published by Turkey's Supreme Election Council.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main rival, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, concluded their election campaigns with a similar public flourish.

Erdogan prayed at the Hagia Sophia, the Istanbul mosque and former church which the Turkish government in 1934 turned into a museum out of respect for both its Byzantine and Ottoman histories. Erdogan controversially annulled that decision in 2020, one of the many populist moves that have peppered his career.

Meanwhile, Kilicdaroglu marked the eve of the vote by laying flowers at the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who spearheaded the secularization of the country.

The optics seemed to mirror Turkey’s deepening polarization.

A religious fervor underpins much of Erdogan’s support, which appears to have barely been dented by the flailing economy or the government’s shambolic early response to the earthquake, exacerbating a tragedy that claimed over 50,000 lives in Turkey and neighboring Syria.

Outside AK Party headquarters on the night of the first round of presidential votes, that religious sentiment was widespread. “I am afraid. I am worried about him losing,” said Seda Yavuz, a visibly nervous Erdogan supporter. “I am worried that someone else will win. I worry because we are Muslims and we wish for someone Muslim to be our president.”

“I trust the Turkish people. I trust that he is going to win,” another woman, Gozde Demirci, said.

“This is freedom,” said the impassioned Demirci, pointing to her headscarf. Erdogan lifted restrictions on hijab in the public sector in 2013, hailing it as the end of a “dark time.”

“I have this freedom because of him (Erdogan),” she continued. “They (the opposition) don’t want this. They don’t want freedom.”

That support for the sitting president was not properly captured by pollsters and Western media, Mehmet Celik, editorial coordinator of the pro-Erdogan Daily Sabah newspaper told CNN.

Erdogan’s critics argue that he further galvanized his support base by levelling unsupported allegations at the opposition camp. He accused Kilicdaroglu of colluding with Kurdish terror groups and repeatedly referred to the opposition leader — a member of the liberal Muslim Alevi minority — as a not-good-enough Muslim.

“This strategy of ‘not good Muslim and backed by terrorists’ appealed to right-wing voters that were supposed to pick Kilicdaroglu,” said Soner Cagaptay, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The spokesman for Turkey's main opposition party, Faik Oztrak, seemingly warned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan against carrying out any speeches to supporters until the official election results have been announced.

Oztrak, like Erdogan, has asked ballot box observers to stay put at posts until results are finalized. Every Turkish citizen has a right to watch the vote count at their ballot boxes.

When a decision might come:  Results are expected sooner than the first round, according to Oztrak, "because we’re voting for two candidates only."

"We invite all the officials to act with common sense and fulfil their duties adequately," Oztrak said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked his supporters "to stay at the ballot boxes until results are finalized" through his official Twitter account Sunday.

Every Turkish citizen has a right to watch the vote count at their ballot boxes, and doing so has become something of a tradition in Turkey.

Both candidates are encouraging their voters to watch ballots being counted.