Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu asks voters to “get rid of the authoritarian regime”. On election day Sunday, the opposition’s observers are said to have been attacked.
Sunday, it will be decided who will be president of Turkey.
On election day, the last appeals will come from the two presidential candidates. For opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, it may now look difficult to win, considering both the result in the first round of elections and the latest opinion polls.
But he is fighting for votes to the very end.
I invite all my citizens to vote, the secular presidential candidate continued after casting his vote in the capital Ankara on Sunday.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan voted at the same time in Istanbul with his wife Emine. He asked voters to “show up without complacency” in the second and decisive round of voting.
NTB-AFP reports on the case.
Erdogan received approx. 49.5 percent of the votes against Kilicdaroglu’s 44.9 percent in the first round of voting two weeks ago.
Many therefore believe that Erdogan has victory virtually in his pocket.
Attack on observers
But the election is not entirely without controversial incidents. Opposition election observers have been attacked in a village in southeastern Turkey, according to the deputy leader of Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s CHP party.
Özgur Özel of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) writes on Twitter on Sunday that the party’s observers were attacked in the province of Sanliurfa. They were beaten up and deprived of their phones because they protested irregularities in the voting, he claims.
CHP politician Ali Seker was present, according to Özel. A local journalist tweets that Seker was beaten.
The information has not been able to be verified from other sources. Such sources are often difficult to obtain, you usually have to rely only on the description from the initial source.
According to Özel, there were not enough security personnel on site, he is asking the authorities to ensure that the election goes ahead safely.
There are many indications that Turkey is heading for a new year under Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian and Islamic-oriented rule