C T Online Desk: Turkey votes Sunday in a historic runoff that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enters as the firm favourite to extend two decades of his Islamic-rooted rule to 2028.
The NATO member’s longest-serving leader defied critics and doubters by emerging with a comfortable lead against secular challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the first round on May 14.
The vote was the toughest the 69-year-old has faced in one of Turkey’s most transformative eras since its creation as a post-Ottoman republic 100 years ago.
Kilicdaroglu cobbled together a powerful coalition of Erdogan’s disenchanted former allies with secular nationalists and religious conservatives.
Opposition supporters viewed it as a do-or-die chance to save Turkey from being turned into an autocracy by a leader whose consolidation of power rivals that of Ottoman sultans.
But Erdogan still managed to come within a fraction of a percentage point of winning outright in the first round.
His success came in the face of one of the world’s worst cost-of-living crises and almost every poll predicting his defeat.
The opposition leader tried his best to keep his disappointed supporters’ spirits up.
“Do not despair,” Kilicdaroglu told his supporters on Twitter after the vote.
– Opposition gamble –
Kilicdaroglu vanished from view for four days and re-emerged a transformed man.
The former civil servant’s old message of social unity and democracy gave way to desk-thumping speeches about the need to immediately expel migrants and fight terrorism.
His right-wing turn focused on nationalists that emerged as the big winners of the parallel parliamentary polls.
