Erdogan declares victory in historic Turkish runoff election
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared victory in a historic runoff election, thanking Turkish voters for giving him a mandate to govern the country for the next five years.
Speaking from atop a bus in his home district in Istanbul on Sunday evening, Erdogan thanked the Turkish nation for voting and said he won the runoff vote against challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu with their support.
"We will be ruling the country for the coming five years," Erdogan told his supporters. "God willing, we will be deserving of your trust."
The runoff was held after both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu failed to secure more than 50 percent of the votes required for an outright victory in the first round on May 14.
With almost 100 percent of the votes counted on Sunday evening, Erdogan was the winner with more than 52 percent of the votes, while Kilicdaroglu received nearly 48 percent of the votes.
State-run Anadolu agency reported that the voter turnout was at about 85 percent.
These are unofficial results. Turkey's Supreme Election Council will publish the official result later on.
Earlier in the day, Erdogan asked his supporters “to stay at the ballot boxes until results are finalized.”
“Now is the time to protect the will of the people which we hold in the highest esteem,” Erdogan wrote on his Twitter account.
Erdogan's supporters gathered at his Istanbul residence in anticipation of victory, chanting Allahu Akbar, or God is Greatest.
"I expect everything to become better," said Nisa, 28, a headscarved woman wearing a headband with Erdogan's name.
Chairman of the Supreme Election Board (YSK), Ahmet Yener, said in a statement that the election was not marred by any voting irregularities and fraud.
The polls opened at 8 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) and closed at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT) on Sunday, with more than 64 million Turks reported eligible to vote at nearly 192,000 polling stations, including more than six million who were first-time voters on May 14.
Millions of voters went to the polls in the first round to elect the country’s president and members of its 600-seat parliament, with Erdogan’s AKP winning a majority against the opposition’s six-party Nation alliance in parliament.
The overall turnout in the first round was 87.04 percent, of which 49.5 percent of the ballots went to Erdogan and 44.9 percent were cast in favor of Kilicdaroglu.
The 69-year-old incumbent president defied opinion polls and came out comfortably ahead with an almost five-point lead over his 74-year-old rival on May 14, but he fell just short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.
Kilicdaroglu, a former civil servant who is the candidate of a six-party opposition alliance, leads the Republican People’s Party (CHP) created by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Over the last week, Erdogan received the endorsement of nationalist candidate Sinan Ogan, who came third with 5.2 percent support in the initial vote and was eliminated.
A closely-watched survey, carried out on May 20-21 by national pollster Konda, put support for Erdogan at 52.7 percent and Kilicdaroglu at 47.3 percent for the runoff.
Billed as Turkey’s most important election in recent history, Sunday’s vote will decide not only who leads Turkey but also how it is governed amid an economic crisis that saw the national currency plunging to one-tenth of its value against the dollar in a decade. Turkey’s inflation topped 85 percent in October last year.
MG
