Election night in Turkey begins with confusion. The two main news agencies disseminated completely different figures after the polling stations closed. The independent agency Anka, which is considered close to the opposition, saw the opposition candidate in the lead with 66 percent after counting 51 percent of the ballot boxes. The state news agency painted a completely different picture. According to the report, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was clearly ahead with 61 percent of the votes after 55 percent of the ballots were counted. The electoral authority, on the other hand, did not initially publish its own figures. So the race is still completely open.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan based in Ankara.
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The contradictory picture is due to the Turkish electoral system. The two agencies independently obtain their numbers from party representatives directly from the polling stations. This had already caused guesswork in the first round of voting.
Erdogan is confident of victory
Long before the polls opened, Erdogan had spread certainty of victory by deciding to give his traditional balcony speech in the evening not at the headquarters of his AK Party, but at his presidential palace. In front of the entrance to his thousand-room residence, the OB vans stood close together.
In front of the headquarters of Kilicdaroglu's party, no supporters gathered in the early evening, unlike two weeks earlier in the first round of the presidential election. The CHP itself had urged them not to come. Instead, they should go to the polling stations to watch over the counting process as observers. The CHP called on "our nation" to wait until 19 p.m. local time (18 p.m. German time). Then the party will make a statement.
It is the first run-off election for the presidency in the country's history. At just under 85 percent, voter turnout this time was below the turnout in the first round. Abroad, on the other hand, around 120,000 more Turks voted in the run-off election than in the first round on 14 May.
Criticism from international election observers
There was great nervousness in many polling stations. The opposition parties CHP and HDP reported isolated verbal or physical attacks on their representatives. In Sanliurfa, according to the CHP, the deputy mayor of Istanbul, Ali Seker, was attacked when he tried to prevent a man from voting for the women in his family in a village. The head of the Supreme Electoral Council, Ahmet Yeter, announced after the polling stations closed that no irregularities had been reported to his office that had affected the electoral process.
After the first round of elections, the international election observers of the Council of Europe and the OSCE criticised the general conditions of the election. The incumbent had "an unjustified advantage". A large part of the Turkish media had hardly reported on Kilicdaroglu and if so, then negatively. The independence of the electoral authority is questionable. Erdogan used state resources for the election campaign. Reporters Without Borders said that the news channel of the state broadcaster TRT had spent sixty times more airtime on Erdogan than on his challenger within a month.
A television report even showed a ballot paper in which Kilicdaroglu's picture was missing and only the words "other candidate" were inserted. Kilicdaroglu was referring to all this on Sunday when he said during the vote in Ankara that the election campaign had taken place under "very difficult conditions". But he trusts in the "common sense" of the voters.