2023-05-14 18:45:56
Ankara The outcome of the election in Turkey is uncertain even hours following the polling stations have closed. Conflicting information regarding the first projections for the parliamentary and presidential elections is causing confusion – and criticism of the Turkish state media.
It currently looks as if none of the candidates for the presidency can get more than 50 percent of the votes in this first ballot. This makes a runoff election on May 28 more and more likely.
At 11:40 p.m. local time (10:40 p.m. CEST), the state television broadcaster TRT, following counting around 94.4 percent of all ballot boxes, showed incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan with 49.86 percent ahead of his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who came to 44.38 percent . Two other candidates together achieve less than six percent.
However, the opposition accused the Anadolu News Agency of manipulating the results. She explained that opposition leader Kilicdaroglu was just ahead of Erdogan with 47.42 percent with 46.8 percent. How these numbers were calculated is not clear.
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – a supporter of Kilicdaroglu – said election observers from the ruling Islamic conservative party AKP regularly object to the results of polling stations where Kilicdaroglu is in the lead.
Faik Öztrak, a spokesman for Kilicdaroglu’s social democratic party CHP, sees the situation for the opposition as “extremely positive”. “We’re ahead,” tweeted Kilicdaroglu, who ran as a candidate for a six-party coalition. His party called on the Turkish population not to heed the election results of the state news agency Anadolu.
>> Read here: This alliance wants to replace incumbent Erdogan
In the count of the private news agency Anka, Erdogan is currently only slightly ahead of Kilicdaroglu with 45.3 percent following counting 72 percent of all votes with 48.95 percent. In this case, even taking into account the foreign votes, it would not be clear whether there would be a runoff election.
The difference between the counts comes regarding because the news outlets prefer the incoming counts from different provinces. The state media are accused of first and foremost counting out Erdogan strongholds. The private agency close to the opposition is accused of the opposite.
If Erdogan should ultimately only fall slightly below 50 percent on this election night, he can still hope for a boost from the votes of around 1.6 million Turks abroad. Their vote has not yet been counted.
In the end, the votes might lift Erdogan back over the 50 percent mark – and confirm him in the presidency. The decisive factor here is the Supreme Electoral Authority YSK, which may not announce the official result until Tuesday.
After voting, the ballot papers are thrown into transparent boxes.
(Photo: IMAGO/SNA)
Around 64 million people in Germany and abroad who were eligible to vote were invited to vote. In Germany, around 1.5 million people with a Turkish passport were entitled to vote. Around 192,000 ballot boxes were set up in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of government and opposition observers are deployed, including several German members of the Bundestag. There were no reports of protests on Sunday evening.
Erdogan will run for another five-year term as president. In some polls, the 69-year-old Erdogan, who is increasingly authoritarian, was behind his biggest challenger. 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu of the centre-left CHP party is the joint candidate of an opposition alliance.
The elections are attracting international attention because they show whether a united opposition can oust Erdogan from office. Almost all of the power of the state was concentrated in him.
In the midst of the Turkish elections, one of the most famous and largest daily newspapers has become the target of a cyber attack. The website of the high-circulation newspaper “Sözcü”, which is attributed to the opposition camp, was unavailable on Sunday evening.
More: What the EU and NATO might expect from Kilicdaroglu
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