By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Voting has ended in Turkey’s presidential poll on Sunday, with the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan leading after the counting of 47% of votes, the Turkish state-run news agency said.
Erdogan, who has governed Turkey as either prime minister or president for two decades, had 52.2 of the vote from the results released so far, compared to 41.9% garnered by opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the Anadolu Agency reported.
In the run-up to the election, opinion surveys had indicated that Erdogan was narrowly trailing his challenger.
With the partial results showing otherwise, members of Kilicdaroglu’s center-left, pro-secular Republican People’s Party, disputed Anadolu’s numbers, contending the state-run agency was biased in Erodgan’s favour.
“We are ahead,” tweeted Kilicdaroglu, 74, who ran as the candidate of a six-party opposition alliance.
The election could grant Erdogan, 69, another five-year term or see him unseated by Kilicdaroglu, who campaigned on a promise to return Turkey to a more democratic path and to restore an economy battered by high inflation and currency devaluation.
If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the winner will be determined in a May 28 run-off.
Voters also elected lawmakers to fill Turkey’s 600-seat parliament, which lost much of its legislative power under Erdogan’s executive presidency.
The opposition has promised to return Turkey’s governance system to a parliamentary democracy, if it wins both the presidential and parliamentary ballots.
More than 64 million people, including 3.4 million overseas voters, were eligible to vote.
