The difference between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is narrowing, according to preliminary results cited by CNN.
With 80.48 percent of the votes counted, Erdogan’s lead narrowed slightly to 50.43 percent, compared to Kilicdaroglu’s 43.77 percent, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
The candidate who receives more than 50% of the votes in the first round is elected president, but if no candidate gets the majority of the votes, the election goes to a second round between the two candidates who received the most votes in the first round.
As votes continue to be counted for Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, analysts say it is still too early to call a winner.
The private Anka agency, quoted by the BBC, says that 78% of the votes across the country have been counted and, according to them, Erdogan has 48.5% of the votes, while Kilicdaorlgu has so far 45.7%.
The gap between the two frontrunners is slowly narrowing as the votes from large cities with large populations are taken into account.
“I think it’s still too early to make a call,” Istanbul Research Center director general Can Selcuki told CNN.
“The way things are going at the moment, I expect a head-to-head race to the end – and the biggest indicator of that is the results in Istanbul, which usually reflect the results across Turkey quite well,” he added. he.
“We are in a strange situation because there is just not enough data. The Anadolu news agency, the official agency that has a monopoly on the official results, basically seems to have stopped at some point … At this point, it looks like a war of nerves,” Selcuki added.
Asli Aydintasbas, an expert on Turkish politics and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, questioned whether the opposition sealed the election on Sunday.
Both had high hopes, but the opposition was very confident of reaching 53% tonight. “It doesn’t seem like a possibility,” Aydintasbas said.
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