President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the opposition Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu will likely face each other in the second round of the elections on May 28. Votes cast abroad can still change the situation.
In Turkey, the decision of the presidential election is going to the second round.
When most of the votes were counted Monday morning, it appeared that neither main candidate would get more than 50 percent of the vote. Erdoğan had received a good 49 percent of the votes and his challengers Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu about 45 percent.
Calculation was missing early in the morning a significant part of the votes cast abroad. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan usually gets a lot of votes, especially from Turks living in Germany, which could still change the situation.
Both President Erdoğan and the main opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu still believed that they were moving towards victory at night.
But the start of the campaign for the second round of the elections is in the air.
According to President Erdoğan, it is not a problem if the people decide that the election of the president will be decided in the second round. In a short statement, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the opposition assured that he will win the second round.
It had been expected in advance that economic problems and fatigue with Erdoğan’s autocratic leadership style would have brought victory to the opposition. Now the division in Turkey seems to be only deepening.
It was also held yesterday parliamentary elections. The parliament is largely stripped of power, but it can slow down and make it difficult for the president to act.
Based on preliminary results, President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party and its allies are getting a narrow majority of seats. That is, if Kılıçdaroğlu were to become president now or in two weeks, he would receive a parliament that tends to throw stones at carts at every turn.
One turning point is the ratification of Sweden’s NATO membership. The second is the opposition’s promise to dismantle the current presidential system. That demolition job can be forgotten.
The system could backfire so badly that the country is forced into new elections.
In 2015, two parliamentary elections were held in Turkey within six months, after the Justice and Development Party suffered an electoral defeat. However, the winners of the elections could not agree on the government and in November they marched to the ballot box again.