Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has extended his leadership in Turkey to a third decade after winning re-election in a tense second round.
Erdogan received 52.2 percent of the vote in the second round of the presidential election on Sunday, beating his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who won 47.8 percent, according to preliminary results.
Here are five key takeaways from Turkey’s vote results:
Erdogan is a great political survivor
Erdogan was already Turkey’s longest-serving leader, but his election victory extends his 20-year rule – he was prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and then president – for another five years.
His influence in Turkey can only be rivaled by the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was president for 15 years, from 1923 until his death in 1938.
Erdogan has been able to shape Turkish politics. In 2014 he became the first president elected by popular vote, winning a referendum that changed the government in Turkey to a presidential system.
But ahead of the first round on May 14, the polls were widely seen as the toughest Erdogan had ever faced, amid an ongoing economic crisis, a seemingly united opposition and polls predicting a largely your loss
And yet, while he was forced into a runoff for the first time, Erdogan surprised expectations, coming out on top by around 5 percentage points in the first round and putting the writing on the wall even before the announce the results of the second round.
The political savvy that has contributed to his survival perhaps dates back to Erdogan’s younger days and a career that began in the 1970s in Beyoglu, the Istanbul district that includes his childhood home in the working-class Kasimpasa neighborhood .
He rose through the ranks and in 1994 became the mayor of Istanbul, where he tackled many of the problems facing the city’s rapidly growing population, including air pollution, garbage collection, and lack of clean water.
But his rise led to a clash with the Turkish state, and even a prison term and political ban for publicly reading a politically charged poem.
Erdogan went on to found the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which won the 2002 election in the context of a financial crisis. Since then, the AK Party has won every national election it has contested and has survived numerous challenges, most notably a failure in 2016.
Erdogan has reinvented himself, found new alliances and changed policy when deemed necessary, and despite an increasingly emboldened opposition, he has held on to power.
For many supporters, especially in Turkey’s Anatolian heartland and the Black Sea region, he is the man who represents them, regardless of what his critics say.
Erdogan addresses his supporters after his victory in the second round of the presidential election at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey [Umit Bektas/Reuters]
This may be the end of Kilicdaroglu
In his first comments after it became clear Erdogan would continue as president, Kilicdaroglu said he would continue what he called a “struggle for democracy.”
“All the media in the state were mobilized for a political party and put themselves at the feet of one man,” said the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Despite the loss, Kilicdaroglu has not yet resigned as CHP leader. Calls for him to do so now will likely increase.
It is not Kilicdaroglu’s first defeat since he was elected as party leader in 2010, with the CHP losing parliamentary elections in 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2023 and backing the losing candidate in the 2014 presidential election. and 2018.
There were already questions about Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy ahead of the vote after a key ally, Meral Aksenser, briefly withdrew her support. And now many opposition politicians are looking to Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, respectively, as future leaders.
CHP’s Kilicdaroglu addresses the media after voting in the second round in Ankara [Adem Altan/AFP]
Were the Kurds discouraged by nationalist rhetoric?
Looking at the electoral map in Turkey, it is clear that support for Kilicdaroglu reached Istanbul, Ankara and Turkey’s western Aegean coast, as well as the Kurdish-majority southeast.
Voters in the southeast did not vote for the CHP in the parliamentary election (pro-Kurd Yesil Sol came out on top), a sign that the presidential vote was driven less by support for the party and more by opposition to Erdogan.
The president has lost support in recent years for the crackdown on the largest pro-Kurdish party, the HDP, and military and security operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its affiliates in Turkey and beyond.
However, looking at the results of the second round of elections, it is clear that there was a significant drop in turnout, between 5 and 8 percent, in the southeast.
It could perhaps have been a response to the increasingly nationalistic rhetoric adopted by Kilicdaroglu and the opposition in an attempt to garner the support of voters who backed the ultra-nationalist Sinan Ogan in the first round.
Kilicdaroglu accepted the endorsement of far-right Umit Ozdag, which may have further alienated Kurdish voters.
The issue of Syrian refugees remains a concern
The campaign took an increasingly anti-refugee tone, with the opposition in particular vowing to force Syrians and other refugee populations to leave.
During the first round of elections, Ogan won 5.2 percent of the vote with the support of the newly established ultra-nationalist ATA Alliance, led by Ozdag’s Victory Party.
Ogan and Ozdag’s election campaign platform strongly opposed Erdogan and his AK Party, although Ogan eventually threw his support behind the president.
Their agenda revolved around a promise to send millions of refugees into the country back to their homelands and they used harsh language towards “terrorist” groups.
Kilicdaroglu accused the government of allowing 10 million “irregular migrants” into the country, an incorrect figure. “We will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that allowed 10 million irregular migrants to come among us,” he said in a video posted on Twitter days before the runoff.
Kilicdaroglu’s campaign further increased its anti-refugee tone by warning that the number of refugees and migrants could rise to 30 million.
The rhetoric has led to an increase in xenophobic comments, both online and in public, and an increasingly hostile environment for Syrians and other refugee populations.
Democracy decides in Turkey
The joint parliamentary and presidential vote decided not only who leads Turkey, a NATO member country of 85 million people, but also how it is governed, where its economy is headed amid a deep crisis in the cost of living and the form of their foreignness. politics.
Although the exact turnout for Sunday’s runoff has not yet been announced, observers said voter turnout was high. The turnout was 89 percent in the first round.
Erdogan has been accused of taking an increasingly authoritarian turn in Turkey, but both government and opposition supporters can point to the high voter turnout as proof that Turkey as a nation is invested in its democracy and that the Turks are eager to participate.
