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Business News/ News / World/  Turkey election result: Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims victory in historical Presidential runoff
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Turkey election result: Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims victory in historical Presidential runoff

‘We will be ruling the country for the coming five years,’ Erdogan told his cheering supporters from atop a bus in his home district in Istanbul. ‘God willing, we will be deserving of your trust.’

Supporters of the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dance outside AK Party offices in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, May 28, 2023. Erdogan takes lead in unofficial count in Turkey's presidential runoff. (AP)Premium
Supporters of the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dance outside AK Party offices in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, May 28, 2023. Erdogan takes lead in unofficial count in Turkey's presidential runoff. (AP)

Turkey elections: In the historical runoff to the presidential elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared victory in the polls that posed the biggest challenge to his 20 years of transformative but divisive rule.

Looking at yet another term as President, the 69-year old Erdogan faced down Turkey's biggest economic crisis in generations and a united opposition to take a commanding lead.

Erdogan's win means the President will be able to secure a mandate to continue his increasingly authoritarian rule which has polarised Turkey and strengthened its position as a regional military power.

The official Anadolu state news agency showed the Islamic-rooted leader ahead of his secular opposition rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu by four percentage points, with 97 percent of the vote counted.

This victory will reinforce Erdogan's image of invincibility, after having already redrawn domestic, economic, security and foreign policy in the NATO member country of 85 million people.

NATO member Turkey's longest-serving leader was tested like never before in what was widely seen as the country's most consequential election in its 100-year history as a post-Ottoman republic.

Kilicdaroglu cobbled together a powerful coalition that grouped Erdogan's disenchanted former allies with secular nationalists and religious conservatives.

He pushed Erdogan into his first runoff on May 14 and narrowed the margin further in the second round.

Opposition supporters viewed it as a do-or-die chance to save Turkey from being turned into an autocracy by a man whose consolidation of power rivals that of Ottoman sultans.

Erdogan looked tired but at ease as he voted with his wife Emine in a conservative district of Istanbul, telling citizens to “turn out and vote without complacency."

Erdogan is lionised by poorer and more rural swathes of Turkey's fractured society because of his promotion of religious freedoms and modernisation of once-dilapidated cities in the Anatolian heartland.

"It was important for me to keep what was gained over the past 20 years in Turkey," company director Mehmet Emin Ayaz told AFP in Ankara.

"Turkey isn't what it was in the old days. There is a new Turkey today," the 64-year-old said.

But Erdogan has caused growing consternation across the Western world because of his crackdowns on dissent and pursuit of a muscular foreign policy.

He launched military incursions into Syria that infuriated European powers and put Turkish soldiers on the opposite side of Kurdish forces supported by the United States.

His personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin has also survived the Kremlin's war on Ukraine.

Turkey's troubled economy is benefiting from a crucial deferment of payment on Russian energy imports that helped Erdogan spend lavishly on campaign pledges this year.

Erdogan also delayed Finland's membership of NATO and is still refusing to let Sweden join the US-led defence bloc.

Turkey's unravelling economy will pose the most immediate test for whoever wins the vote.

Erdogan went through a series of central bankers to find one who would enact his wish to slash interest rates at all costs in 2021 -- flouting conventional economics in the belief that lower rates can cure chronically high inflation.

Turkey's currency soon entered freefall and the annual inflation rate touched 85 percent last year.

Erdogan has promised to continue these policies and rejected predictions of economic peril from analysts.

Turkey burned through tens of billions of dollars trying to support the lira from politically sensitive falls ahead of the vote.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Published: 28 May 2023, 10:54 PM IST
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