Written by Chris Muhizi Minembwe Capital News 11:40pm Nairobi Kenya Time.
The Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan, declared victory in the election on Sunday, extending his increasingly authoritarian leadership into a third decade after defeating his most formidable opponent to date.
Erdogan expressed gratitude to his followers while speaking to them from the top of an Istanbul bus and claimed that Turks have elected him to lead the country for the next five years.
The opposition thought it had a good chance of unseating Erdogan after his popularity was hurt by a cost-of-living crisis, and the election was viewed as one of the most important Turkey had ever seen.
Instead, victory will bolster his sense of invincibility because he has already altered domestic, economic, security, and diplomatic policy in the 85 million-person NATO member state.
The opposition believed it had a good chance of ousting Erdogan after his popularity was hurt by a cost-of-living crisis, making the election one of the most significant for Turkey to date.
Erdogan reportedly received 52.1% of the vote in the second round on Sunday, defeating his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who received 47.9%, with 97.6% of the ballot boxes unsealed.
The outcome hasn’t been officially ratified by Turkey’s Supreme Election Council.
A cost-of-living crisis that saw inflation reach an all-time high of 85% in October and earthquakes that claimed more than 50,000 lives in February surrounded the elections, in which over 64 million Turks both at home and abroad were eligible to vote.
With a promise to build on the advancements made by his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) administration, Erdogan, 69, who first assumed office as prime minister in 2003, gave a vision of continued progress.
In what was widely seen as the nation’s most significant election in its 100-year history as a post-Ottoman republic, NATO member Turkey’s longest-serving leader was put to the test like never before.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s rival, put together a potent alliance of secularists and the president’s disgruntled former allies.
Several world leaders have congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after state media reported that he had won re-election in a historic run-off that posed the biggest challenge to his 20 years in power.
Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, congratulated Erdogan. Among the leaders who congratulated him in the Middle East, where he has sometimes used military force to establish Turkish influence, were the presidents of Iran, Algeria, and Qatar.
