Turkey is getting ready for tomorrow’s unprecedented second round of elections in which its president will be elected, after a bitter election campaign last night, full of promises and anathemas against the Kurds and Syrian refugees by both rivals.
In the run-off, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a lead of almost five points (49.5 percent), or 2.5 million votes, over his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu (44.5 percent), the candidate of a heterogeneous six-party coalition with a broad spectrum from the nationalist right to the center-left.
What the polls show
The latest polls – the institutes conducting them were way off in the run-up to the first round – confirm the head of state’s lead, putting him five points ahead.
Despite this figure, which a priori favors the master of the political game in Turkey for the last twenty years, there is still an unknown variable: that is the 8.3 million votes of the citizens who did not express themselves in the first round, even though the turnout reached 87%.
