Erdo?an’s grip on power tested as Turkey votes in pivotal election

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Turkey is heading to the polls, with 64 million citizens casting their vote in an election that could end Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s two decades in power.

Polls have increasingly shown Erdo?an’s competitor for the presidency Kemal K?l??daro?lu in the lead, with both candidates racing to get more than 50% of the vote in order to avoid a runoff vote in two weeks’ time.

A weighted poll of all Turkish election polls, 600 Vekil, predicted a 63% chance of a K?l??daro?lu victory. The same polls have increasingly suggested that Erdo?an’s governing coalition, led by his Justice and Development party (AKP), could lose its majority in parliament.

Turkey’s six-party opposition coalition is vying to win both a parliamentary majority and the presidency in order to enact sweeping reforms, overhauling two decades of Erdo?an policies and returning Turkey to parliamentary democracy.

“We promise democracy. Democracy is a very beautiful, wonderful thing,” said K?l??daro?lu, who has campaigned as an answer to Turkey’s increasingly polarised political environment and what his supporters say is Erdo?an’s divisive rhetoric.

Erdo?an has fallen behind in the polls as voters react to the results of 20 years of his rule, including a brutal economic crisis that caused the lira to devalue by half last year alone and soaring inflation. Criticism of his government increased after a slow and patchy state response to deadly twin earthquakes in the country’s south-east that killed more than 50,000 people and destroyed homes and infrastructure across 11 provinces.

Despite this, Erdo?an has increasingly used his rallies to castigate his political opponents as enemies of the state. He has said each member of the six-party opposition coalition is LGBT, and broadcast an alleged deepfake video of banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for K?l??daro?lu at a rally just one week before the vote.

K?l??daro?lu, a member of Turkey’s Alevi religious minority, says he intends to build a more inclusive society and step back from Erdo?an’s heavy-handed control of public institutions and the media. The leader of the Republican People’s party has also promised to deport millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees who sought shelter in Turkey from conflicts at home.

The prospect of either K?l??daro?lu or Erdo?an reaching the 50% threshold increased just days before the ballot, after one of the four candidates, Muharrem ?nce, dropped out following the release of what he alleged was a false sex tape created with deepfake technology and footage from “an Israeli porn site”.

K?l??daro?lu later accused Russia of election interference and creating deepfake videos, declaring: “If you want the continuation of our friendship after 15 May, get your hands off the Turkish state. We are still in favour of cooperation and friendship.”

Turnout for the vote is expected to be high, while the CHP, the largest opposition party, is running a parallel vote count it hopes will ensure electoral integrity, posting observers to watch over every ballot box across the country.

A CHP official, Canan Kaftanc?o?lu, said: “The most important moments will be when the polls close and when the vote counting begins. For this we have organised a digital system, so poll watchers take pictures [of each ballot] and send them to CHP headquarters in Ankara and Istanbul.

“We are going to give the actual result to people and hoping it will be a good result for us.”

Kaftanc?o?lu organised similar efforts to protect the vote in Istanbul’s contested mayoral election in 2019 and was banned from politics last year for insulting Erdo?an.

“There’s a hard and unsettling fact here in Turkey, ballot box security, and we have to make this happen. As a Turkish citizen, I am bitter about this. There’s a power that wants to steal votes, and this power is the government,” she said.

Observers argue that Erdo?an’s near total control of the media environment as well as influence on key institutions such as the supreme election council (YSK) provide him with an upper hand, but not total control of the vote.

Nate Schenkkan of Freedom House said: “This is where issues around whether this is a free and fair election come in. Do functioning democratic institutions remain viable despite the enormous pressure they’ve been put under the past 10 years, including a number of significant electoral violations?

“But at the same time, people argue credibly that the actual process of voting, balloting and political culture remain strong, so therefore an unpopular president running a ruinous economic policy can actually lose. That’s the question: can he, and will he let himself?”

A day before the vote, Twitter announced that “in response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today”. The blocking appeared to affect at least one account of critics of the Turkish state based outside of the country, although no further clarification was provided.

The government also resisted pressure from the opposition to allow those registered to vote within the 11 provinces destroyed by the earthquakes earlier this year to change their addresses, forcing thousands to return to their destroyed towns in order to be able to cast their ballots. The millions of potential votes cast across the affected area are expected to affect the outcome of the election.

Despite the opposition offering some free transportation or even paying out of pocket for their family members to travel, many voters said the cost of the travel was simply too high for them to make it back in order to vote.

“There was supposed to be a boat to take us, but out of almost 1,000 people [the CHP] picked only around 100 so I couldn’t get there,” said Bar?? Yapar from the town of Samanda? in Turkey’s southernmost province, Hatay. “I can’t afford at least 3,000 TL (?123) just to go and come back there, so now I’m hoping for the best.”

Others who had remained in the earthquake zone said they felt the votes cast there could sway the overall result.

“My district won’t support Erdo?an because we saw people die when the earthquake happened- people died but no rescue teams arrived on time. They left people to die, screaming and asking for help,” said one man in Hatay who asked to remain anonymous. He said that he had long voted for the opposition, but his district had previously supported Erdo?an and the AKP.

“All the people I know want to get rid of Erdo?an,” he said. “My fear is that the government will manipulate the results if they see that they’re losing, or that people who support them will fight in the streets. People think it’s not going to be a normal night.”