Photo Credit: Twitter/@RTErdogan
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proved to the world once again that he is too hard to die politically. On Sunday’s runoff election, he got 52.14 per cent against 47.86 per cent of his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu and so he will continue to be President until 2028 and will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Turkey’s establishment as a Republic, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
As per ANI report, In the first round of Turkey’s presidential elections held on May 14, Erdogan proved wrong almost all opinion polls which showed the leader of the opposition Kemal Kilicdaroglu leading the polls. Erdogan got 49.5 per cent of the vote, four percentage points ahead of Kilicdaroglu. As a result, Turkish voters for the first time ever had to go to the ballot box for a second time to elect the next president.
After three stints as Prime Minister and two as President, Erdogan was already Turkey’s longest-serving leader, but this time he was facing the biggest challenge in his political life, as the country is facing skyrocketing inflation that led to a huge cost of living crisis. At the same time, the Turkish Lira, which at the start of Erdogan’s career was roughly 1.50 to the US dollar, is now at a record low of more than 20 to the dollar.
Moreover, he has been facing criticism for following unorthodox economic policies by pushing the Turkish Central Bank to repeatedly lower interest rates, something that fuelled inflation and depleted the country’s foreign exchange reserves- and also for the slow response on the part of the state to the devastating earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people and rendered millions of people homeless.
The big question is how Erdogan has convinced the majority of people, despite the very difficult conditions they are facing in their everyday life, as well as the suppression of freedom of expression and assembly, to go to the polling stations and vote for him.
