Turkey Election Result: Erdogan re-elected as president for third time in historic runoff

Turkey’s incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday extended his two-decade rule by winning a third term in office.

Near-complete results showed Erdogan beating secular Opposition challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu by four percentage points.

The historic runoff posed the biggest challenge to Erdogan’s 20 years of transformative but divisive rule.

The 69-year-old leader faced Turkey’s biggest economic crisis in generations and united Opposition to take a commanding lead.

NATO member Turkey’s longest-serving leader was tested like never before in what was widely seen as the country’s most consequential election in its 100-year history as a post-Ottoman republic.

Kilicdaroglu cobbled together a powerful coalition that grouped Erdogan’s disenchanted former allies with secular nationalists and religious conservatives.

Big difficulties await Turkey: Kilicdaroglu

He pushed Erdogan into his first runoff on 14 May and narrowed the margin further in the second round.

Opposition supporters viewed it as a do-or-die chance to save Turkey from being turned into an “autocracy led by Erdogan.”

Kilicdaroglu’s brief concession statement expressed “real sadness about the big difficulties awaiting the country” with Erdogan.

Kilicdaroglu re-emerged as a transformed man after the first round.

The 74-year-old former civil servant’s message of social unity and freedoms gave way to desk-thumping speeches about the need to immediately expel migrants and fight terrorism.

His right-wing turn was targeted at nationalists who emerged as the big winners of the parallel parliamentary elections.

Analysts doubted Kilicdaroglu’s gamble would work.

His informal alliance with a pro-Kurdish party that Erdogan portrays as the political wing of banned militants left him exposed to charges of working with “terrorists”.

With inputs from AFP

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