Türkiye goes to the polls to vote for the Presidency in an unprecedented second round

May 28. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The population of Turkey has begun to vote this Sunday for the second round of the presidential elections on May 14, in which the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, aspires to extend his stay in power for five years against the opponent Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, after stay close to a direct victory in the first round.

Erdogan, who has been at the forefront of Turkish politics for two decades – first as prime minister and then as president – obtained more than 27.1 million votes in the first round, representing 49.52 percent of the votes. ballots, just days after dropping that he could work to amend the Constitution and remove the requirement of winning more than half of the votes, at a time when the polls pointed to a very tight race between the two candidates.

Kiliçdaroglu, who stood in the elections with the support of the Table of Six and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) –which initially opted not to present a candidate and later to ask for the vote for the Party’s leader Republican of the People (CHP)–, has tried to scratch votes among the Turkish nationalist sectors to surpass Erdogan.

Thus, in recent days he has hardened his discourse against migration and refugees, which he has brought to the center of political debate, going as far as to promise that he will expel “everyone” if he wins and to place the number at ten million. of refugees in Turkey, a figure that is far from that provided by the United Nations.

The huge discrepancies in the figures derive from the fact that politicians and the media use the term “refugees” to also refer to asylum seekers, people under temporary protection and migrants in an irregular situation. Turkey placed a geographical limitation on its ratification of the 1951 UN refugee convention, saying it affected only people fleeing “events in Europe.”