ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Turkey’s presidential election will be decided in a runoff, electoral authorities said on Monday after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan outsmarted his main rival but did not fall short of the winning margin needed to stretch his increasingly authoritarian rule to a third stretch decade.
The second round of voting on May 28 will decide whether the strategically located NATO country remains under the current president’s firm control or embarks on the more democratic course promised by its rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
Though Erdogan has been in power for 20 years, opinion polls suggest his term may be coming to an end and that the cost-of-living crisis and criticism of the government’s response to February’s devastating earthquake could change the electoral map.
Instead, Erdogan’s fall was even weaker than expected – and with his coalition retaining control of parliament, he is now in a good position to win the runoff.
Uncertainty caused Turkey’s main stock exchange, BIST-100, to fall more than 6% at Monday’s open, prompting a temporary suspension of trading. But stocks rebounded after the resumption, with the index falling 2.5% in the afternoon from Friday’s market close.
Western nations and foreign investors were particularly interested in the outcome, as Erdogan took an unorthodox stance on his country’s economy, often trying inconsistently but successfully to put Turkey at the center of many important diplomatic negotiations. Located at the crossroads of East and West, with a Black Sea coast and borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria, Turkey has been a key country in issues such as the war in Syria, migration flows to Europe, Ukrainian grain exports and expansion of NATO.
Preliminary results showed that Erdogan got 49.5% of the vote, while Kilicdaroglu got 44.9% and third-place candidate Sinan Ogan got 5.2%, according to Ahmet Yener, chairman of the Supreme Electoral Committee.
The remaining uncounted votes were not enough to give Erdogan a complete victory, even if everyone leaned towards him, Yener said. In the previous presidential elections in 2018, Erdogan won the first round with more than 52% of the vote.