Millions of Turks are heading to the polls in presidential and parliamentary elections to decide whether to allow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to continue his 15 years in power and to preserve his party’s majority in parliament.
Turnout is expected to be as high as 85 per cent as energised supporters of both Mr Erdogan and his opponents cast their ballots in the first election since Turkey’s constitution was changed to give the president sweeping new powers.
Mr Erdogan goes into voting day ahead in the polls but facing the most serious election challenge since he first came to power in 2003.
It is not clear if he will be pass the 50 per cent vote threshold he needs to avoid a one-on-one runoff election against Muharrem Ince, the leader of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP). The runoff would take place July 8.
Polling stations close at 3pm UK time and results are expected around 8pm UK time.
Mr Ince and other opposition leaders have warned that Mr Erdogan’s supporters may try to rig the results to keep the Turkish president in power.
By Sunday afternoon, opposition parties were already claiming that Mr Erdogan’s allies had attempted to stuff ballot boxes in the rural district of Suruc near the Syrian border. Videos appeared to show a man opening a ballot box there.
“We urge the authorities to take action against the collective and open stuffing of ballot boxes,” the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said on Twitter. There were reports of a scuffle at the polling station in Suruc and voting was briefly halted there.
"We're watching the incident in Suruc very closely," said Meral Akşener, a nationalist presidential candidate. "I urge state officials to save the honour of the state."
Police fired warning shots to stop a speeding car in Suruc, where they found four bags full of stamped ballot papers, according to the Dogan News Agency. Three people were detained.
In his final campaign rally in Istanbul on Saturday, Mr Ince urged his CHP supporters to head to polling stations and carefully monitor ballot boxes to prevent election fraud. “I’m declaring 36 hours of mobilisation,” he told the crowd.
At Sensipasa Elementary School in the Uskudar neighbourhood of Istanbul, CHP supporters answered the call. Fatih Bayhan, a 55-year-old trader, came to his polling station at 5am to monitor the handling of ballots.
“It we thought the election was going to be fair we wouldn’t have been here around the ballot boxes at dawn,” he said. Despite his concern over vote rigging, Mr Bayhan said he still thought the opposition had a chance to win the election. “I’m hopeful,” he said.
Mr Erdogan’s supporters also turned out at the polls, with many citing the rise in living standards since 2003 as their reason for backing the president.
“I have never seen a better president than Erdogan," said Nermin, a 74-year-old pensioner who declined to give her last name. “Before him there weren’t good roads, there was garbage everywhere, we had shortages of tap water.”
Turkey has has a long history of fair elections dating back to the 1950s. But last year’s referendum on changing the constitution was marred by last-minute changes to voting rules and allegations of ballot box stuffing by Mr Erdogan’s party.
Among the changes was a decision by the electoral commission, made on the day of the 2017 referendum, to accept ballots that hadn’t been stamped by election officials. Election observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) concluded “late changes in counting procedures removed an important safeguard” on voting.
No comments:
Post a Comment