Erdogan leads in Turkey’s election, but opposition disputes numbers

Early returns from Turkey's national election Sunday had President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a solid lead after some 47 per cent of ballot boxes were counted.

Early returns from Turkey’s national election Sunday had President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a solid lead after some 47 per cent of ballot boxes were counted, the Turkish state-run news agency said, while the longtime leader’s main challenger disputed the numbers that showed him trailing.

Erdogan, who has governed Turkey as either prime minister or president for two decades, had 52.2 of the vote from the partial count, compared to 41.9 per cent garnered by opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the Anadolu Agency reported.

In the run-up to the election, opinion surveys had indicated the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan narrowly trailed his challenger. The race had appeared to be shaping up as the toughest re-election bid of the Turkish leader’s 20-year rule of his NATO member nation.

With the partial results showing otherwise, members of Kilicdaroglu’s center-left, pro-secular Republican People’s Party, or CHP, disputed Anadolu’s numbers, contending the state-run agency was biased in Erodgan’s favour.

“We are ahead,” tweeted Kilicdaroglu, 74, who ran as the candidate of a six-party opposition alliance.

The election could grant Erdogan, 69, another five-year term or see him unseated by Kilicdaroglu, who campaigned on a promise to return Turkey to a more democratic path and to restore an economy battered by high inflation and currency devaluation.

If no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the vote, the winner will be determined in a May 28 run-off.

Voters also elected lawmakers to fill Turkey’s 600-seat parliament, which lost much of its legislative power under Erdogan’s executive presidency. If his political alliance wins, Erdogan could continue governing without much restriction. The opposition has promised to return Turkey’s governance system to a parliamentary democracy if it wins both the presidential and parliamentary ballots.