Erdogan claims victory in Turkiye’s presidential runoff polls

Turkiye’s incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed victory in presidential runoff polls.

Addressing his supporters in Istanbul, Erdogan said that the Turkish nation is the winner in the second round of the presidential election and all 85 million of the nation’s citizens won.

With this victory, the door of the “Century of Türkiye” has opened, he emphasized. His speech came after results showed him leading with 52.10 percent of the vote with 98.2 percent of the ballots counted.

Opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu received 47.88 percent. “Your will has become Türkiye’s unbending, stainless power at the ballot box,” Erdogan added.

More than 60 million people were registered to vote, including 4.9 million first-time voters. A total of 191,885 ballot boxes were set up for voters in the country.

Earlier today, Turks began voting in a presidential runoff that could see Tayyip Erdogan extend his rule into a third decade and persist with Turkiye’s increasingly authoritarian path, muscular foreign policy and unorthodox economic governance.

Erdogan, 69, defied opinion polls and came out comfortably ahead with an almost five-point lead over his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the first round on May 14. But he fell just short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff, in a race with profound consequences for Turkiye itself and global geopolitics.