Turkey is voting in the second round of its closely contested presidential election, as incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoan seeks to extend his two-decade reign.
The polls opened on Sunday morning in Turkey’s first-ever presidential run-off after Mr Erdogan failed to reach the 50% threshold two weeks ago, with him behind his top competitor, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, by 4%.
Unlike two weeks ago, polling locations in Istanbul have not seen crowds or long queues of voters, which is mostly due to election officials needing less time to process voters than on May 14, when Turks also voted in parliamentary elections.
Both groups have presented the elections as a watershed point in Turkish history that could either solidify Mr Erdogan’s conservative and authoritarian leanings or give Turkey a chance to restore a democratic society.
For the first time since Mr Erdogan’s election, the opposition has rallied around a single candidate, Mr Kilicdaroglu, a soft-spoken bureaucrat nominated by six main opposition groups ranging from moderate Islamic to secular left-wing.
Fantastic Turnout
Buoyed by pre-election polls that showed Mr Kilicdaroglu had a genuine chance of defeating Mr Erdogan, Turks flocked to ballot stations with extraordinary zeal two weeks earlier, yielding a staggering 89 percent turnout.
However, opposition supporters were handed a severe setback when Mr Erdogan was shown to be clearly in the lead.
After mobilising the majority of their political base, Mr Kilicdaroglu and his allies launched a last-ditch effort to win new voters in recent weeks, using some decidedly right-wing campaign slogans such as “send back all Syrians” from Turkey, which hosts the country’s largest refugee population of about 3 million.
New campaign posters featuring a solemn-looking Kilicdaroglu and the words “Syrians will go” have appeared across Turkey.
The stakes are high in Sunday’s election because Turkey’s secular, Western-leaning society fears that Mr Erdogan, who has already ruled Turkey longer than its founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, could tighten the screws on freedom of expression and women’s rights even further.
Turkish actress Merve Dizdar, who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, celebrated Turkish women’s quest for rights, fighting for the “good days that they deserve in Turkey” in a slightly politically charged speech.
Mr Erdogan’s supporters slammed Ms Dizdar’s acceptance speech, in which she became Turkey’s first woman to win the Cannes best actress award, with a prominent member of the president’s party, Emre Cemil Ayvali, dismissing her as a “slave of the West” who has been “smearing her own country.”
