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Turkey voted Sunday in a momentous election that could extend President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade grip on power or put the mostly Muslim nation on a more secular course.
Turnout was expected to be huge in what has effectively turned into a referendum on Turkey’s longest-serving leader and his Islamic-rooted party.
It is the toughest of more than a dozen that the 69-year-old leader has confronted -- one that polls hint he might lose.
“We need change, we’ve had enough,” farmer Mehmet Topaloglu told AFP after voting amid the ruins left by a deadly February earthquake that razed the ancient city of Antakya and other parts of the southeast.
Erdogan has steered the nation of 85 million through one of its most transformative and divisive eras in the post-Ottoman state’s 100-year history.
Turkey has grown into a military and geopolitical heavyweight that plays roles in conflicts from Syria to Ukraine. The NATO member’s footprint in both Europe and the Middle East makes the election’s outcome as critical for Washington and Brussels as it is for Damascus and Moscow.
Erdogan is still lionised across swathes of conservative Turkey that witnessed a development boom during his rule. More religious voters are also grateful for his decision to lift secular-era restrictions on headscarves and introduce Islamic schools.
“My hope to God is that after the counting concludes this evening, the outcome is good for the future of our country, for Turkish democracy,” Erdogan said after casting his ballot in Istanbul.
‘We all miss democracy’
Erdogan’s first decade of economic revival and warming relations with Europe was followed by a second one filled with social and political turmoil.
He responded to a failed 2016 coup attempt with sweeping purges that sent chills through Turkish society and made him an increasingly uncomfortable partner for the West.
The emergence of Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his six-party alliance, a group that forms the type of broad-based coalition that Erdogan excelled at forging throughout his career, gives foreign allies and Turkish voters a clear alternative.
Polls suggest the 74-year-old secular opposition leader is within touching distance of breaking the 50-per cent threshold needed to win in the first round.
A runoff on May 28 could give Erdogan time to regroup and reframe the debate. But he would still be hounded by Turkey’s most dire economic crisis of his time in power and disquiet over his government’s stuttering response to a quake that claimed more than 50,000 lives.
“We all missed democracy,” Kilicdaroglu said after voting in the capital Ankara. “You will see, God willing, spring will come to this country.”
Polls show Kilicdaroglu winning the youth vote -- nearly 10 per cent of the electorate -- by a two-to-one margin.
“I can’t see my future,” university student Kivanc Dal told AFP in Istanbul on the eve of the vote. Erdogan “can build as many tanks and weapons as he wants, but I have no respect for that as long as there is no penny in
my pocket”.
But nursery school teacher Deniz Aydemir said Erdogan would get her vote because of the economic and social progress Turkey made after half a century of corruption-riddled secular rule.
