Neither the president nor his opponent Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu will pass the 50 percent threshold needed for an outright win.
A singing, grinning President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told supporters he was ready to fight a second round in Turkey’s election on May 28, sensing he had the momentum to beat his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who undershot expectations in Sunday’s first round.
With 99 percent of ballot boxes opened, Turkey’s Supreme Election Council said on Monday that Erdoğan had won 49.4 percent of the vote, only narrowly shy of the 50 percent needed for an outright win. Kılıçdaroğlu had secured 44.96 percent, disappointing a poll consensus that he had a narrow lead.
A veteran electoral campaigner, a grandstanding Erdoğan appeared on a balcony of his AK party headquarters in Ankara in the early hours of Monday with a microphone singing “We love you so much” to the crowd and praising them for the “feast of democracy” they had just served up. Dismissing the opposition’s claims of foul play, he even predicted the final trickle of results from Sunday’s polls could push him over the 50 percent needed for another five-year stint in power.