ANKARA - Turks began voting on Sunday (May 28) in a presidential runoff that could see Tayyip Erdogan extend his rule into a third decade and persist with Turkey's increasingly authoritarian path, muscular foreign policy and unorthodox economic governance. Erdogan, 69, defied opinion polls and came out comfortably ahead with an almost five-point lead over his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu in...
ANKARA - Turks began voting on Sunday in a presidential runoff that could see Tayyip Erdogan extend his rule into a third decade and persist with Turkey's increasingly authoritarian path, muscular foreign policy and unorthodox economic governance.
The election will decide not only who leads Turkey, a NATO-member country of 85 million, but also how it is governed, where its economy is headed after its currency plunged to one tenth of its value against the dollar in a decade, and the shape of its foreign policy, which has seen Turkey irk the West by cultivating ties with Russia and Gulf states.
The initial election showed larger-than-expected support for nationalism - a powerful force in Turkish politics which has been hardened by years of hostilities with Kurdish militants, an attempted coup in 2016 and the influx of millions of refugees from Syria since war began there in 2011. Another nationalist, Umit Ozdag, leader of the anti-immigrant Victory Party , announced a deal declaring ZP's support for Kilicdaroglu, after he said he would repatriate immigrants. The ZP won 2.2per cent of votes in this month's parliamentary election.
"More Erdogan means more Erdogan. People know who he is and what his vision for the country is, and it seems a lot of them approve."