Turkey is voting, and the results could end Erdogan’s 20-year rule.

ISTANBUL: On Sunday, Turks voted in one of the most important elections in modern Turkey’s 100-year history. This election could either get rid of President Tayyip Erdogan and stop his government from becoming more and more authoritarian, or it could bring him another 10 years in power.

Turkey is a NATO country with 85 million people. The election will decide not only who will lead the country, but also how it will be ruled, where its economy will go in the midst of a deep crisis in the cost of living, and how its foreign policy, which has taken unexpected turns, will look.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who leads an alliance of six opposition parties and is Erdogan’s main opponent, has a small lead in the polls, but if neither of them gets more than 50% of the vote, there will be a second round of voting on May 28.

Voters will also choose a new parliament. It is likely to be a close race between the People’s Alliance, which includes Erdogan’s conservative Islamist-rooted AK Party (AKP) and the nationalist MHP, and Kilicdaroglu’s Nation Alliance, which includes his secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and six other opposition parties.

Voting started at 8:00 a.m. (0500 GMT) and will end at 5:00 p.m. (1400 GMT). In Turkey, it is against the law to report any results before 9 p.m. By the end of Sunday, it might be pretty clear if there will be a second round of voting for the president.

Some people in Diyarbakir said they had voted for the opposition, while others said they had voted for Erdogan. Diyarbakir is a city in the mostly Kurdish southeast that was hit hard by an earthquake in February.

“The country needs a change,” said Nuri Can, who is 26 years old and voted for Kilicdaroglu because of the economic problem in Turkey. “After the election, the economy will be in trouble again, so I wanted to make a change.”

But Hayati Arslan, who is 51 years old, said he had voted for Erdogan and his AK Party.

“The economy of the country is not doing well, but I still think Erdogan will fix it. With Erdogan, Turkey’s reputation around the world has hit a very high point, and I want this to keep going,” he said.

In the city, lines formed at voting places, and about 9,000 police officers were on duty across the province.

Many people in the provinces where the quake, which killed more than 50,000 people, happened were angry at how slowly the government responded at first, but there isn’t much proof that this has changed how people will vote.

Kurdish voters, who make up 15–20% of the electorate, will be very important, since the Nation Alliance is not expected to get a majority in parliament on its own.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is not part of the main opposition group, but its members have been persecuted in recent years, so its members are now very opposed to Erdogan.

The HDP has said that it will vote for Kilicdaroglu for president. It is running for parliament under the name of the small Green Left Party because a top prosecutor has filed a court case to ban the HDP because it has ties to Kurdish militants, which the HDP rejects.

A new beginning?

Erdogan, who is 69 years old, is a strong speaker and a master campaigner. He has pulled out all the stops on the campaign road as he fights to make it through his hardest political test. He has a lot of support from religious Turks who used to feel like they didn’t have a voice in secular Turkey. His political career has survived a failed coup attempt in 2016 and many corruption cases.

But if the Turks do get rid of Erdogan, it will be mostly because they lost wealth, equality, and the ability to meet basic needs as a result of 85% inflation in October 2022 and the collapse of the lira currency.

Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old former civil worker, says that if he wins, he will get rid of Erdogan’s heavy hand in the economy and go back to more traditional economic policies.

Kilicdaroglu also says he would try to get the country back to the parliamentary system of government. In 2017, a vote approved Erdogan’s executive presidential system. He has also said that he will restore the freedom of the judiciary, which Erdogan is said to have used to silence people who disagree with him.

During his time in power, Erdogan has tightened his grip on most of Turkey’s institutions and put leftists and critics in the background. In its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said that Erdogan’s government has set Turkey’s human rights record back by decades.

If he wins, Kilicdaroglu will have to work hard to keep a union of nationalists, Islamists, secularists, and liberals together.

During the last few days of the campaign, there were claims of outside interference.

Kilicdaroglu said that his party had proof that Russia was behind the release of “deep fake” material online, but Russia denied this. Erdogan said that the people who disagreed with him were working with Vice President Joe Biden to get rid of him. A spokesman for the US State Department said that the US government does not take sides in elections.