After a historic election with a rerun, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won another term in office. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a candidate for the opposition, gave the leader of Turkey a hard time.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey will stay in office for another five years after barely winning Sunday’s runoff vote.
Ahmet Yener, the head of the Election Board (YSK), said on Sunday that Erdogan beat his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu because he got 52.14 percent of the votes.
The Turkish president told his fans that voters had given him the power to run the country for the next five years soon after he said he had won.
Erdogan said, “Today, Turkey is the only winner.”
Kilicdaroglu, the head of the opposition, said that the election was the “most unfair in years,” but he promised to keep “leading this struggle” against the Erdogan government.
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“We will keep being at the front of this fight until our country has real democracy,” he said.
“What makes me really sad is how hard things are going to be for the country,” he said, without admitting loss outright.
Erdogan calls for ‘unity and solidarity’
In a winning speech on Sunday night, Erdogan called for “unity and solidarity” and promised to end all disagreements and bring the country together around “national values and dreams.”
Erdogan said that his tight victory was a victory for “Turkish democracy” and all 85 million people who live in the country.
“We have no anger, resentment, or frustration with anyone,” he told the French news agency AFP. “Today, nobody lost. The whole country of 85 million people won.”
Then Erdogan said that “terrorist organizations” were the winners of the election.
He agreed that the country’s very high inflation was the most important problem, but he said it wasn’t hard to fix. He said inflation would go down, and he promised to build a strong economy based on security and trust.
He also promised to help get back another million Syrians who had fled to nearby Turkey during the civil war in their country.
Erdogan said that his main goal would be to fix up the towns that were destroyed by an earthquake in February.
How will this affect Turkey?
Erdogan is now Turkey’s leader who has been in power the longest since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk started the country a century ago. It will give him more energy to push for economic, social, and military policies that are different from the norm.
The head of Turkey’s conservative AKP (Justice and Development Party) has talked about Islamic principles and a popular way of thinking.
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During his 20-year rule, he gave hope to Turkey’s religious conservatives, who had felt left out by the country’s liberal rulers. Erdogan, for example, has promised to write into the constitution the right to wear an Islamic headscarf, and a court ruled that Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is a mosque.
He also put Western partners and NATO friends to the test on more than one occasion. Most recently, he delayed Norway’s entry into the alliance and stopped Sweden from joining at all.
NATO partners like the US, Germany, the UK, and France were quick to praise Erdogan on his latest win. They joined Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Erdogan has kept ties even after the war in Ukraine.
Analysts say that Erdogan’s unorthodox economic policies, which are to blame for the country’s current inflation and cost-of-living problems, were the biggest threat to his support at home. The unstable economy of the country is also likely to be at the top of his list of problems.
Erdogan insisted on cutting interest rates no matter what in 2021. This sent the local currency into a free fall and pushed the annual inflation rate up to 85%.
Analysts have warned the Turkish leader, but he has vowed to stay on track.
Erdogan’s government has also been harshly criticized for how slowly it helped people after a series of devastating earthquakes in the border area between Turkey and Syria earlier this year.