Erdoğan will lead Turkey for another five years. According to official results, he obtained 53% in the first elections held since the constitutional reform.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been confirmed as president of Turkey. The elections held on Sunday 24 June crowned him head of state once again. And, this time, also prime minister: it was, in fact, the first vote held since the reform that transformed the euro-Asian nation into a "hyper-presidential" system, in which the roles of president and prime minister merge into a single monocratic office.
Erdoğan will therefore remain in power for at least another five years, following the fifteen he has already spent leading his country. "What won these elections is democracy, it is the will of the people. What won is each one of our 81 million citizens," the president declared before the crowd that cheered him outside the headquarters of the AKP (Justice and Development Party, with an Islamist-conservative orientation).
According to local media reports, after nearly all polling stations had been counted, Erdoğan came first with approximately 53 per cent of the vote. His main rival, social democrat Muharrem İnce, received 30.7 per cent. Voters were also electing a new Parliament: the alliance dominated by the president's party secured 53.61 per cent, while the opposition alliance came in at around 34 per cent.
The figures, however, have been contested by the anti-Erdoğan coalition: the Republican People's Party (CHP), which had sent its own representatives to the majority of the 180,000 polling stations across Turkey, stated that according to its own calculations the president had not in fact crossed the 50 per cent threshold, and therefore would not have been elected in the first round. CHP spokesperson Bülent Tezcan spoke of "gross manipulation" and described the official results as "unreal".
Furthermore, the opposition politician added, "numerous complaints have been filed, particularly in the province of Şanlıurfa." He also cited the case of a ballot counter who claimed to have extracted more ballots from his ballot box than the total number of registered voters. The territorially competent prosecutor's office announced it had opened an inquiry and four people have already been arrested, according to the Anadolu news agency.
Finally, leaders of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey's main pro-Kurdish political movement, announced from the city of Diyarbakır, in south-eastern Turkey, that they had cleared the electoral threshold set at 10 per cent. Party representatives will therefore be able to count on a number of seats in Parliament during the next legislative term.