© Reuters. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters in Istanbul, Turkey, May 18, 2023. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
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(Corrects paragraph 4 to restore the omitted word ‘millions’ in the number of Turkish citizens in Germany.)
By Daren Butler
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Foreign-based Turkish citizens began voting on Saturday in the second round of Turkey’s presidential election between incumbent Tayyip Erdogan and his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who is seeking to end the president’s two-decade rule .
A runoff election will take place in Turkey on May 28 after Erdogan fell short of the 50% threshold needed to win the presidential vote last Sunday in what was expected to be his biggest political challenge.
Some 3.4 million Turks are eligible to vote abroad, out of a total electorate of more than 64 million, and will cast their ballots from May 20-24.
The state-run Anadolu news agency said voting had started in countries across Asia and Europe. Germany is home to the world’s largest Turkish diaspora, where there are around 1.5 million voting Turkish citizens.
In last Sunday’s vote, Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and its nationalist allies won a comfortable parliamentary majority.
Kilicdaroglu, a candidate from a six-party opposition alliance, garnered 44.88% support in the presidential election, trailing Erdogan with 49.52% and confounding expectations in opinion polls that the challenger would win.
Attention now turns to the nationalist Sinan Ogan, the candidate who came in third with 5.17% support. Any decision of his to support one of the two candidates in the runoff could potentially play a decisive role.
Kilicdaroglu’s rhetoric has taken a nationalist turn after he trailed Erdogan in the first round of voting, saying the government had allowed 10 million refugees into the country and would repatriate all of them if elected.
It did not provide evidence on the number of migrants. Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population of around 4 million, according to official figures. Ogan had campaigned to send migrants, including some 3.6 million war-displaced Syrians, back south.
Erdogan says only he can ensure stability in Turkey, a NATO member state, as it grapples with a cost-of-living crisis, skyrocketing inflation and the shock of February’s devastating earthquakes.
(This story has been corrected to restore the omitted word ‘millions’ in the number of Turkish citizens in Germany, in paragraph 4)