Feature: Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu, Turks cast ballots in presidential election runoff-Xinhua

Feature: Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu, Turks cast ballots in presidential election runoff

Source: Xinhua

Editor: huaxia

2023-05-28 21:51:00

by Zeynep Cermen, Burak Akinci

ANKARA/ISTANBUL, May 28 (Xinhua) -- Nebahat Esen, a retired woman in her 60s, arrived at a polling station in Istanbul, Türkiye's largest city, precisely at 8 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) on Sunday to join the first group of voters for the country's presidential election runoff.

"I wasn't so enthusiastic in the first round, but have become very excited now, because the vote difference between the two candidates is so tiny," Esen told Xinhua at a school in the busy Besiktas district on the European side of the city.

Halime Gurcay, another voter in Istanbul, said she had waited eagerly for the runoff day to get the result. "The only thing I have been thinking about in these two weeks was who will win and who will do what to solve the country's problems," she told Xinhua after casting her vote, pointing to the economic difficulties that Turkish people have long been struggling with, such as high living costs.

The runoff on Sunday was held two weeks after the first round of presidential elections on May 14. Almost 54 million people cast ballots in the first round, contributing to a high voter turnout of 86.98 percent.

None of the candidates had received more than 50 percent of the votes needed to call a winner in the first round. The incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan won 49.52 percent of the votes and the opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu won 44.88 percent. Meanwhile, the third-place candidate, nationalist politician Sinan Ogan, gained 5.17 percent and withdrew from the race to back Erdogan.

Erdogan has championed nationalist pride and security during a tense election campaign, during which the fate of 3.7 million Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants from Afghanistan and Iraq has become an important issue.

Kilicdaroglu has adopted a more nationalistic rhetoric after the first round, pledging to send all refugees and asylum seekers back to their home countries. He has also promised to return to economic orthodoxy to fight rampant inflation and a high cost of living, while Erdogan said he would maintain his unconventional economic model of tackling high inflation with interest rate cuts.

"In the first round no one could win, so we are here to decide who our next president will be," Alperen Durmus, a young man in his early twenties told Xinhua in a polling station in capital city Ankara's Hilal district.

Durmus admitted openly that he voted for Erdogan as he views the long-term serving president as "the best leader Türkiye has got to preserve our nation's independence."

"We are not demoralized, we hope for a victory, it is still within reach," said Funda Eryigit, a university lecturer who supports Kilicdaroglu, as she was leaving a polling station with her husband and teenage son in Ankara.

The polls for the presidential election runoff opened at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) and will close at 5 p.m. local time. Unofficial results are expected after 7 p.m. local time, according to media reports.