Erdogan wants to achieve “historic success” in the second round

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His challenger, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was confident and combative. He read a notice of change to Sunday’s result, he wrote on Twitter. “But it is also clear that we are the ones who have to fight much harder to get rid of such a ruthless regime,” Kilicdaroglu said. “We still have twelve days to get out of this dark tunnel.”

Meanwhile, the pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP has appealed the results to election authorities in nine districts.

In Turkey’s presidential election on Sunday, incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan received the most votes, but just missed out on an absolute majority. He will now face runner-up Kemal Kilicdaroglu in a runoff on May 28. According to preliminary data, Erdogan’s government alliance was able to retain the majority in parliament.

The results of the presidential election surprised many. Polls had predicted a second round, but Kilicdaroglu was the favourite. There are some 2.5 million votes between Erdogan and his opponent, whom the opposition now wants to overtake. A key role is played by the supporters of third-placed Sinan Ogan, who received some 2.8 million votes.

The pro-Kurdish HDP criticized that more than 2,000 votes had been wrongly attributed to the government alliance in their strongholds. She appealed against this. The HDP ran under the banner of the Green Left Party (YSP) because of an imminent party ban. A total of 1,350 YSP votes went to the ultra-nationalist MHP and 229 to Erdogan’s conservative AKP, the HDP said. The electoral authority will consider objections until Thursday. She wants to announce the final result on Friday.

The coordinator of OSCE and Council of Europe election observation missions, Michael Link, called for more equal opportunities in the second round of the elections. The mistake that the government side is clearly favored in the media should not be repeated, the FDP politician told the Tagesspiegel (Tuesday).

Regarding last Sunday’s first round of elections, Link said there had been irregularities, not so much on election day itself, but during the election campaign leading up to it. “This election was marked by a very high profile presence of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the media, and consistently positive. Opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, on the other hand, had great difficulty getting into the media. If he succeeded, it was mostly negative,” said Link.

There was anger over a decision by election authorities to shorten the voting period in some countries for Turks living abroad. This was reported to particularly affect countries where the opposition led the way in the first round – such as the US, Canada and Britain. However, the decision was reversed after the opposition, suspecting a system behind it, objected.

Exiled journalist Can Dündar expressed concern that Erdogan’s victory in the second round could exacerbate the so-called brain drain. “There will be an exodus of brilliant people,” said Dündar of the German press agency in Berlin. His phone has been ringing since this morning. Dündar lives in exile in Germany. For him personally, Erdogan’s victory would mean more years in exile, he said. Dündar was the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper. He was sentenced to a long prison term three years ago for an article about arms transfers by the Turkish secret service to Syria.

In total, about 64 million people were called to vote in Sunday’s elections, about 3.4 million of them abroad.

(SDA)

Source: Blick