Results in: Erdogan gains victory in historic Türkiye runoff
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gained victory on Sunday in a historic runoff that posed the biggest challenge to his 20 years of transformative but divisive rule.
The official Anadolu state news agency showed the leader ahead of his secular opposition rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
A separate count published by the pro-opposition Anka news agency showed Erdogan leading.
Nato member Türkiye’s longest-serving leader was tested like never before in what was widely seen as the country’s most consequential election in its 100year history as a post-ottoman republic.
Kilicdaroglu cobbled together a powerful coalition that grouped Erdogan’s disenchanted former allies with secular nationalists and religious conservatives.
He pushed Erdogan into his first runoff on May 14 and narrowed the margin further in the second round.
“I invite all my citizens to cast their ballot in order to get rid of this authoritarian regime and bring true freedom and democracy to this country,” Kilicdaroglu said after casting his ballot in Türkiye’s first presidential runoff.
Erdogan voted with his wife Emine in a conservative district of Istanbul, telling citizens to “turn out and vote without complacency.”
Kilicdaroglu re-emerged a transformed man after the first round.
The former civil servant’s message of social unity and freedoms gave way to deskthumping speeches about the need to immediately expel migrants and fight terrorism.
His right-wing turn was targeted at nationalists who emerged as the big winners of the parallel parliamentary elections.
The 74-year-old had always adhered to the firm nationalist principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk -- a revered military commander who formed Turkiye and Kilicdaroglu’s secular CHP party.
But these had played a secondary role to his promotion of socially liberal values practised by younger voters and big-city residents.
Erdogan is lionised by poorer and more rural swathes of Türkiye’s fractured society because of his promotion of religious freedoms and modernisation of once-dilapidated cities in the Anatolian heartland.
“It was important for me to keep what was gained over the past 20 years in Türkiye,” company director Mehmet Emin Ayaz said in Ankara.
“Türkiye isn’t what it was in the old days. There is a new Türkiye today,” the 64-year-old said.