Polling stations in Turkey close after momentous election
Voter turnout was high for an election that could determine Turkey’s future.
Turks have finished voting in one of the most sweeping elections in the country’s 100-year history, a contest that could end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20-year rule and reverberate far beyond Turkey’s borders .
Election polling stations, where voters cast their votes for both the president and parliament, closed at 5 p.m. local time (2 p.m. GMT).
A large turnout means there are long queues at polling stations all over Turkey, especially in the biggest cities. The Istanbul Bar Association has reminded people that if they wait at a polling station before 5pm, they can stay and vote, but anyone who comes in line after that will not be allowed to vote.
Turkish law prohibits reporting results until 9pm (6pm GMT), although that has been raised in the past. Late Sunday could be a good indication of whether there will be a runoff.
Opinion polls have given Erdogan’s main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who heads a six-party alliance, a slight lead, with two polls on Friday showing him above the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote on Sunday, a second round will take place on May 28.
The presidential vote will decide not only who will lead Turkey, a NATO member state of 85 million people, but how it will be governed, where the economy will go amid a deep cost-of-living crisis, and the shape of its foreign policy.
Erdogan has led the nation through one of the most transformative and divisive eras in the post-Ottoman state’s 100-year history.
Turkey has become a military and geopolitical heavyweight, playing roles in conflicts from Syria to Ukraine. Its footprint in both Europe and the Middle East makes the outcome of the election as crucial for Washington and Brussels as it is for Damascus and Moscow.
So Turkey may be entering a post-Erdogan era after Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections, and that could mean foreign policy changes.
Erdogan continues to rule parts of Turkey that witnessed a development boom during his rule.
More religious voters are also thankful for his decision to lift restrictions on headscarves and other secular-era religious matters.
The rise of Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his six-party alliance — a group that forms the kind of broad coalition that Erdogan has excelled at forging during his career — gives foreign allies and Turkish voters a clear alternative.
Polls show that 74-year-old secular opposition leader Kilicdaroglu is on the verge of breaking the 50 percent threshold needed to win in the first round.
A second round on May 28 could give Erdogan time to regroup and reshape the debate.
But he would still be hounded by Turkey’s most serious economic crisis in his time in power and by unrest over his government’s stuttering response to the February earthquakes that claimed more than 50,000 lives.