Much to the surprise of most polling institutions and the stock market, incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the lead in the results of the May 14 elections in Turkey. He finished roughly 5% ahead of his main contender, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in the presidential vote, and his ruling coalition secured 322 of the 600 parliament seats. It looks like the die is cast for the May 28 runoff, and both the Istanbul Stock Exchange and the Turkish lira have anticipated the final result as both nosedived in mistrust of prolonged “Erdoganomics,” which was probably key to delivering the votes of the Anatolian heartland to the president — though they should translate into a worsening of the financial crisis in Turkey as a whole.
A map of the voting results’ regional breakout epitomizes the split between two — actually, three — constituencies, which heavily mobilized voters with an 89% turnout, a figure seldom reached in Western democracies. Erdogan’s arch-nationalist and conservative Islamist coalition (the so-called “Turkish-Islamist synthesis”) leads in widely Sunni central Anatolia — including in Maras, which was devastated by the February quakes, where the death toll was amplified by developers bribing local authorities to allow for seismic substandard building. The incumbent got close to 72% of the votes. While the more developed and affluent coastal western and southern regions and the capital city, Ankara, and the majority Kurdish-populated East gave their ballot to the opposition, it was not sufficient to tilt the balance in its favor.