Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the majority of votes in Sunday's high-stakes election, according to election officials – surviving the most serious challenge yet to his political dominance and tightening his grip on the nation he has ruled for 15 years.
Sadi Guven, Turkey’s Supreme Election Board chief, said 97.7 percent of the votes were counted and “the votes that have not been tallied so far do not change the outcome.”
Erdogan had declared himself the winner before the official results were announced, speaking to supporters first in Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, before flying to Ankara, the capital, to address voters from his party’s headquarters.
Speaking from a balcony at the AK Party’s offices in the early hours of Monday morning, he called the entire population of Turkey “winners.”
He also thanked the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party’s (MHP) leader, members and voters, who are in coalition with his Justice and Development Party.
The results were a blow to Erdogan’s closest rival, Muharrem Ince and his Republican People’s Party, known as the CHP, who had seemed on the verge of forcing the President into a damaging runoff and denying the AKP-MHP alliance a parliamentary majority.
With his victory, Erdogan will gain sweeping new powers when he resumes office. He narrowly won a referendum last year to transform the country’s parliamentary system to a powerful executive presidency, in what his critics called a blatant power grab.
Around 59 million people were eligible to vote in both presidential and parliamentary elections Sunday. Erdogan said the participation rate was 90 percent, an extraordinarily high number for any election.
Earlier, state news agency Anadolu reported that the President had sailed through the snap vote at 52.7 percent, with more than 96 percent of the ballots counted. It also said the AKP-MHP coalition had more than 53 percent of the parliamentary vote, with over 98 percent of the votes counted.
But the opposition CHP had said that around half the ballot boxes had not yet been counted, and called on party monitors to stay by the ballot boxes and keep watching.
A spokesman for Erodgan’s AKP, Mahir Unal, dismissed the accusations and warned party leaders of “harsh outcomes” to any provocations.
Erdogan has dominated Turkish politics since his rise as prime minister in 2003 and has transformed the nation. He implemented policies that encouraged sustained economic growth and development, he challenged Turkey’s secular foundations by bringing Islamic conservatism to public life and he gutted public institutions by having tens of thousands of people – many of them his critics – arrested after a failed military coup in 2016.
Erdogan himself called the snap elections 18 months early, as he faces battles on several fronts: Turkish voters are feeling the pain of soaring inflation, a plunging currency and high interest rates as the economy falters, and the normally splintered opposition is largely united against him for the first time in years.
Erdogan has won several consecutive elections to become Turkey’s longest-serving leader.
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