The president currently leads his pro-Western rival by 16 points.
According to early election results in Turkey, incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a sizable lead over challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The majority of the votes have not yet been tallied, though.
On Sunday, voting booths closed at 5 p.m. local time, and Anadolu Agency released the preliminary results several hours later. Erdogan got 49% of the vote and Kilicdaroglu had 44% after roughly 20% of the votes had been tallied. At 6%, Sinan Ogan, who is usually seen as a long shot for the presidency, trailed well behind in third place.
More than 1.7 million Turks residing abroad were among the 64.1 million registered voters. Anadolu Agency stated that 85% of people participated.
In the polls conducted before the election, Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu were only a few points apart.
The election was sometimes framed as a vote on Erdogan, who has been the president of Turkey since 2014 and served as prime minister for 11 years before to that. Erdogan has bolstered the authority of his own office while establishing Turkey as a significant regional player after thwarting a 2016 coup attempt.
Under his direction, the EU accession process has stalled as Turkey splinters from its NATO partners to pursue closer ties with Russia and China on the economic and diplomatic fronts.
Kilicdaroglu has pledged to deconstruct some of Erdogan’s executive powers and to refocus Turkey toward the West. He has pledged to adopt the measures demanded by Brussels and to swiftly reopen EU membership negotiations if elected.
Both sides made allegations of foreign intervention throughout the election’s lead-up. Kilicdaroglu accused Russia of spreading “montages, conspiracies, deep fakes and tapes” – apparently a reference to footage purportedly linking Kilicdaroglu to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is classified as a terrorist organization in Türkiye. Erdogan and his officials described a slew of negative op-eds and magazine covers in the Western press as an attempt to swing the vote against him.
Kilicdaroglu made unsupported assertions, which Moscow has publicly refuted.
