Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can – in theory at least – be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate.
With over 99 per cent of the votes of Sunday night’s presidential vote counted, it looks like neither the 69-year-old Erdogan nor his challenger, the 74-year-old veteran leader of the Republican People’s party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have managed to break the required 50 per cent threshold to prevent a runoff. Erdogan is currently on 49 per cent, according to estimates by the official Anadolu Agency, while Kilicdaroglu is on 45 per cent. There are only two million ballots still to be accounted for, which leaves the third candidate, ultranationalist Sinan Oğan, with about 5 per cent of the vote (up from a pre-election estimate of 1 per cent) as a potential kingmaker in a runoff in two week’s time.
A vote against Erdogan would be a plunge into the unknown for the majority of Turks
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opponents have regularly described him as a dictator, and his supporters know him as ‘The Sultan’.
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