In Turkey's presidential election, incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to win by a narrow margin. The state news agency Anadolu saw him in the lead with 94.52 percent to 4.47 percent after counting 6 percent of the ballot boxes. The independent agency Anka, which is considered close to the opposition, reported a narrow lead of 51.4 for Erdogan. She saw the challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu at 48.6 percent after 96 percent of the ballot boxes had been counted.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan based in Ankara.
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Previously, both agencies had published completely different figures. This was due to the fact that both agencies independently obtain their numbers from party representatives directly from the polling stations. In elections, Anadolu often publishes the results from strongholds of the ruling AKP party first. The spokesman for Kilicdaroglu's Republican People's Party (CHP), Faik Öztrak, accused the state agency of "manipulation". He spoke of a neck-and-neck race. No one should be confused by Erdogan's "balcony speech".
Erdogan is confident of victory
Öztrak was referring to the president's announcement that, unlike usual, he would not hold his traditional balcony speech in the evening at the headquarters of his AK Party, but in his presidential palace. In doing so, he conveyed certainty of victory. 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.
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.
Nervousness at the polling stations
There was great nervousness in many polling stations. The opposition parties CHP and HDP reported very 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.