TURKISH ELECTION HEADING TO RUNOFF

Turkish voters will head back to the polls in two weeks for a runoff election to decide if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or his main rival will lead a country struggling with inf lation as it plays a key role in NATO expansion and in the Middle East.

The May 28 second round of presidential elections that election officials announced Monday will allow Turkey to decide if the nation remains under the increasingly authoritarian president for a third decade, or if it can embark on the more democratic course that Kemal Kilicdaroglu has claimed he can deliver.

As in previous years, the nationalist Erdogan led a highly divisive campaign.

He portrayed Kilicdaroglu, who had received the backing of the country’s pro-Kurdish party, of colluding with “terrorists” and of supporting what he called “deviant” LGBTQ+ rights. As a devout leader of the predominantly Muslim country, which was founded on secular principles, Erdogan has had the backing of conservative voters and has courted more Islamists with his antiLGBTQ+ rhetoric.

In a bid to woo voters hit hard by inflation, he increased wages and pensions and subsidized electricity and gas bills, while showcasing Turkey’s homegrown defense industry and infrastructure projects.

Kilicdaroglu leads the pro-secular main opposition party, which was established by the founder of modern Turkey. He campaigned on promises to reverse crackdowns on free speech and other forms of democratic backsliding and to repair an economy battered by high inflation and currency devaluation.

As the results came in, it appeared those elements didn’t shake up the electorate as many expected. Turkey’s conservative heartland overwhelmingly voted for the ruling party, with Kilicdaroglu’s main opposition winning most of the coastal provinces in the west and south.

Western nations and foreign investors were particularly interested in the outcome because of Erdogan’s unorthodox leadership of the economy, and often mercurial but successful efforts to put the country that spans Europe and Asia at the center of many major diplomatic negotiations.

Preliminary results showed that Erdogan won 49.5 percent of the vote on Sunday, while Kilicdaroglu grabbed 44.9 percent, and the third candidate, Sinan Ogan, received 5.2 percent, according to Ahmet Yener, the head of Supreme Electoral Board.