A runoff round for the presidency between the two will take place on May 28 if the results are confirmed by Turkey’s Supreme Election Board.
The vote marks Erdogan’s toughest electoral challenge during two decades at the top of Turkish politics, and it is effectively a referendum on the strongman leader’s rule. The results could have sweeping consequences for the nation’s economy and political freedoms, as well as the balance of global power.
In the run-up to election day, opposition supporters accused the Turkish president of using state resources to tilt the field in his favor, raising the minimum wage three times and blasting his announcements out through state media while Kilicdaroglu had to rely on speeches delivered from his kitchen table through social media to make his voice heard.
In the early hours of Monday, Erdogan addressed supporters from the balcony of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara, telling them he thought that his campaign had triumphed, but that he was willing to accept a runoff.
“We certainly believe that we will win the election in the first round,” he said.
Kilicdaroglu, 74, said his campaign would also contest a second round but urged supporters to stay at the polling stations until every vote was counted. “Despite all of his lies and attacks, Erdogan did not receive the desired outcome,” he said. “The election is not won on the balcony.”
He also accused AKP officials of trying to stall the counting process, claiming that the results for hundreds of ballot boxes in Ankara and Istanbul were being challenged. “There are ballot boxes where the vote has been contested six times, 11 times,” he said.
In a short statement late Sunday, the head of Turkey’s Supreme Election Council, Ahmet Yener, insisted that was not the case.
Erdogan, 69, who first gained national prominence as the mayor of Istanbul, the country’s most-populous city, is modern Turkey’s most successful politician. A deeply polarizing figure who has ruled for some two decades, he has been accused by critics of diluting democracy by using repressive tactics against civil society and the media, while concentrating power as president. Supporters say he has modernized the country through massive infrastructure projects and brought Islam back into public life in Turkey.
The devastating earthquakes in southern Turkey in February that killed more than 50,000 people have cast a shadow over the election. Erdogan’s government was accused of lax enforcement of building codes and a slow disaster response, worsening the effects of the quakes.
Kilicdaroglu, in contrast, cast himself as an everyman during the campaign, promising to tackle financial woes — Erdogan’s unorthodox economic policies have contributed to soaring inflation — and strengthen democratic norms.
The election has the potential to remake geopolitical alliances as the war in Ukraine drags into a second year and Arab states normalize relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government after a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, most of them by his forces.
Under Erdogan, Turkey, a NATO member, has balanced relations between the West and Russia, sometimes acting as diplomatic intermediary over a Black Sea grain deal and the freezing of conflict lines in Syria, straining relations with the United States and the European Union.
On the final day of campaigning, Erdogan had accused the United States of trying to interfere in the election. The ballot boxes, he predicted, would “give Biden an answer.”