A professor of economics and social sciences at Duke University believes that the autocratic leader lost in the first round of the election.
14.5. 23:27
Timur Kuran, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina, United States, painted a bleak picture of the integrity of the smooth vote count in Turkey on Sunday evening.
Kurin, who has a Turkish background, works as a professor of economics and political science at the university and specializes in the Middle East, Islam and social change, among other things. According to him, Turkey’s official news agency Anadolu had stopped updating the election results in the evening. The professor estimates that this is directly due to instructions from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
– Erdogan will not give up. His strategy, writes Kuran, is to delay vote counting in opposition-supporting constituencies, exhausting opposition election observers and buying time, while his party prepares a clear picture of the results.
– As we wait for his next move, it is clear that he lost in the first election round. Will we end up with each other? It remains to be seen.
According to Kuran’s information, Erdogan’s AKP party has complicated the counting of votes in hundreds of polling stations, where its results have come in less than expected. He takes it for granted that the party’s election observers have been instructed to seek a recount of votes.
Where they lag behind, they often demand a recount. Therefore, the declared election results so far have been manipulated based on where the AKP and Erdogan performed well. However, the resulting delay does not affect the result.
Counting of votes is done again and again in the polling stations where the opposition is clearly ahead. Even if the results are the same, the AKP or one of its allies will demand more recounts. This tactic of delay is now being used across the country to make Erdogan appear victorious.
Turkey’s Sunday elections became a referendum of sorts on whether Erdogan’s more than twenty-year rule would continue or whether the Muslim-majority country would move in a more secular, or secular, direction than it is now.
Contradictory reports have come out about the results just before midnight on Sunday evening. Several opinion polls have predicted the main opposition candidate, Kemal Kilikdaroglu, to be the winner.
According to the TRT channel, Erdogan was leading with 51.23 percent of the vote after 21:00. Kilicdaroglu, who came second, got 42.95 percent of the vote.
Earlier, state news agency Anadolu reported that after nearly 60 percent of votes were counted, Erdogan was leading with 51.84 percent. According to Anadolu, Kilicdaroglu had 42.53 percent of the vote at the time.
