Agencies: Erdoğan vote falls below 50% The gap between the two leading candidates continues to narrow as more big-city votes – generally favouring opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu – come in, but Turkish news agencies are still reporting different numbers. They agree on one thing, however: a runoff now looks increasingly likely. The state news agency, Anadolu, is reporting that more than 90% of votes have been counted. It has President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on 49.8% – crucially, below the 50% needed to avoid a runoff – and Kılıçdaroğlu on 44.4%. The privately owned Anka agency is reporting that 94% of votes have so far been counted. It has Erdoğan on 49.02% and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on 45.2%. In either case, as things are at the moment, the presidential election is heading for a second round on 28 May. The mayor of Ankara, a senior member of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s opposition CHP party, has said he expects his candidate to finish ahead of President Erdoğan. “There is a short time left to get all the results,” Mansur Yavas told a joint press conference in Istanbul with the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu. “When we see them, we will see our leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu finishing this round as the front-runner.” But Yavas said there was now “a high possibility” that the race would go to a second round. The electoral council, meanwhile, which will announce the final result, has said a total of 69% of votes – cast both at home and abroad – have been entered into its system. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is registered to vote in Istanbul, has made a surprise appearance there, mingling with supporters, before getting into his car and heading to the capital, Ankara to await the official results. As we wait for the last few million votes in the presidential election to be counted, we shouldn’t forget today’s other poll: the election for Turkey’s 600-seat parliament. At present over 80% of ballot boxes have been opened and Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance (a coalition of right-leaning and right-wing parties, including his AKP’s coalition partner MHP) appear on track to become the largest block. No surprises there. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s opposition Nation Alliance, led by his CHP (with the right-wing Iyi Party) is the second largest, and appears to have bagged around a third of the votes (35.6% of the total, according the state news agency Anadolu). Erdoğan’s former economy tsar, Ali Babacan, and former foreign policy guru, Ahmet Davutoglu, are both running on the CHP ticket (despite having established their own parties in the run up to the election) and don’t appear to have significantly impacted the Nation Alliance’s share of the vote. But the CHP did well on along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, in Thrace and in the major cities of Izmir, Istanbul and the capital Ankara. The results also indicate a strong showing for nationalist parties. MHP was real the surprise performer tonight. At the present count, the MHP and its splinter party, Iyi, have about 20% of the vote between them, though they represent opposing camps in this race. The Yesil Sol party, a successor to the HDP, has swept up the country’s south-eastern region with strong showings in Diyarbakir, Hakkari and Sirnak (over 60%). Most of this region also voted strongly in favour of opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Most people will have their eyes on the results from the presidential elections, which increasingly look like they’ll go to a second round. But the Turkish parliament remains an important institution and will have a major role in the coming government, either as a spoiler for a president who doesn’t control it, or a boon for a president whose political allies are represented in it. Despite the powerful executive presidency Erdoğan introduced in 2018, the parliament has the power to declare war, ratify treaties, pass budgets, amend the constitution and scrutinise the activities of the government. Members, officials and supporters of both candidates’ parties are waiting for confirmation of the results in a presidential race that now looks likely to head to a second-round runoff in two weeks’ time. It could be some time before we get an official result. Ahmet Yener, the head of Turkey’s supreme election council, – which will announce the final figures – has said it has entered just over 47% of domestic votes and 12.6% of votes cast abroad into its system. In short statement outside the council’s headquarters, Yener also rejected opposition allegations that it was deliberately delaying publishing some results. Agencies: Erdoğan vote falls below 50% The gap between the two leading candidates continues to narrow as more big-city votes – generally favouring opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu – come in, but Turkish news agencies are still reporting different numbers. They agree on one thing, however: a runoff now looks increasingly likely. The state news agency, Anadolu, is reporting that more than 90% of votes have been counted. It has President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on 49.8% – crucially, below the 50% needed to avoid a runoff – and Kılıçdaroğlu on 44.4%. The privately owned Anka agency is reporting that 94% of votes have so far been counted. It has Erdoğan on 49.02% and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on 45.2%. In either case, as things are at the moment, the presidential election is heading for a second round on 28 May. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tweeted to criticise opposition attempts to declare the result ahead of time, and – as his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu did earlier – to ask party and election officials to remain vigilant with ballot boxes. “While the election was held in such a positive and democratic atmosphere and the vote counting is still going on, trying to announce results hastily amounts to a usurpation of the national will,” he said. “I ask all of officials and my colleagues to stay at the ballot boxes, no matter what, until the results are officially finalised. I congratulate all citizens who voted in the name of democracy and are taking part in the election work.” Ultranationalist Sinan Oğan, currently credited with about 5% of the vote and a potential kingmaker in the event of a runoff, has said he thinks the election will probably go to a second round on 28 May. “We see a high probability that the elections will go to the second round” since neither main candidate is on course to win 50% of the vote, he said, adding that “Turkish nationalists and Kemalists are key to this election”. Opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has posted another tweet suggesting that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s vote share, which began the evening at 60%, has now fallen to below 50%. He urged election officials to stay alert and not abandon their posts during the rest of the evening. “The fiction, which started with 60%, has now dropped below 50%,” Kılıçdaroğlu said. “Ballot observers and election board officials should never leave their places. We will not sleep tonight, my people. I warn the YSK [election commission], you have to provide data from the provinces.” We have just arrived at the Istanbul headquarters of the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), after a journey across Istanbul where the streets were remarkably quiet. Earlier today, people were outside enjoying a day of spring weather and cheerfully walking to the polls no matter who their chosen candidate was, but as the results started to come in, the streets fell silent – it felt like basically everyone was at home glued to their television sets. If they did venture out, they were frantically following on their phones. The mood at the CHP is predictably tense – everyone here is quietly glued to any screen showing the results. As the vote count nears 80% of votes counted – at least, according to the state news agency Anadolu (which has been the source of plenty of controversy so far this evening) – the race is looking increasingly close and we’re starting to see two parallel narratives emerge. According to the opposition, they are ahead. According to Erdoğan and the spokesperson of his Justice and Development (AKP) party as well as the state news agency, the opposition is falling behind. The opposition claim this is due to the order in which the ballots have been counted, and that the government has slow-walked counting in opposition-majority areas. As the results started to trickle in a couple of hours ago, leading opposition MPs held multiple press conferences to drive home the message that they are winning, at least according to their data. Now we are seeing Erdoğan and the AKP pushing back, although we are likely to hear more from the CHP as this long night continues. Ali İhsan Yavuz, an AKP MP in charge of election coordination, just told reporters outside their headquarters in Ankara that “there is no panic and there is no need to blame the institutions”. He added: “We are ahead in both the parliamentary and the presidential results.” Reuters: both camps say runoff looking likely Reuters is reporting sources in both President Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party and his opposition rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s CHP as saying that based on results so far, neither is likely to clear the 50% threshold needed for an outright win. With 75% of votes counted, the state-owned Anadolu news agency has Erdoğan on 50.76% and Kılıçdaroğlu on 43.43%. The private Anka agency also has Erdoğan ahead, but by a much narrower margin: roughly 48% to 47%. The steady performance of the third candidate, nationalist Sinan Oğan, unchanged at just over 5.3%, makes a second round – scheduled for a fortnight’s time on 28 May – more likely, several analysts have said. Ankara’s mayor, Mansur Yavaş, from Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s centre-left CHP party, has said that based on data from party workers monitoring the count, the retired civil servant is ahead. Turkish news agencies are reporting that President Erdoğan has a lead of between two and eight percentage points with about two-thirds of votes counted. Yavaş insisted Kılıçdaroğlu was still in a position to win the election outright on Sunday night by securing more than 50% of the vote. Turkey’s supreme election council is expected to announce the official result later. Ömer Çelik, a spokesperson for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party, has accused opposition leaders of “an attempt to assassinate the national will” by claiming the Anadolu state news agency is distorting the results (see 18.03 BST). “Even before the results are finalised, all of a sudden the opposition alliance’s spokesperson and mayors appear on TV. As usual, they began to say that Anadolu Agency is manipulating data,” Çelik said. More than 50% of votes counted More than half the votes have now been counted in Turkey’s presidential election and the gap between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his chief rival, opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, continues to narrow. According to the Anadolu state news agency, which the opposition has accused of deliberately releasing results to show the outgoing president ahead, the count with nearly 53% of votes tallied stands at: Erdoğan : 51.8% Kılıçdaroğlu : 42.3% Oğan: 5.3% The privately owned Anka news agency, however, has Kılıçdaroğlu already ahead with slighty less of the vote tallied. His CHP party has said their candidate is leading according to its data, and is on course to clear the 50% threshold to avoid a runoff and be declared president on Sunday night. Supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling AKP party have gathered to cheer outside its Istanbul headquarters as early results show the incumbent president ahead. Analysts have said the gap between Erdoğan and his rival, united opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, should continue to narrow as the evening wears on. Opposition vice-presidential candidates Mansur Yavaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu have just given a press conference in the Turkish capital, Ankara, lashing out at the state news agency Anadolu for what they said was broadcasting distorted results. The opposition accuse Anadolu of broadcasting counted AKP votes first in a warped picture of the overall result, and say they are in the lead. The largest opposition party, the Republican People’s party (CHP) is running a parallel count by stationing their own observers at every ballot box and photographing every ballot as it is counted. “According to our results, with 23.87% of the votes counted, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is ahead,” said Yavaş, who is also Ankara mayor, adding: “This data comes from all over Turkey and I can say that we are ahead in Istanbul and Ankara.” İmamoğlu, whose election as mayor of Istanbul in 2019 was a close race that was ultimately disputed by Erdoğan and re-run before he was declared the winner a second time, also directed his anger at Anadolu. “Unfortunately, we are still experiencing the scene we see in every election. Another case of Anadolu Agency [...] AA’s reputation is below zero,” he said. Presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu simply tweeted: “We are ahead.” Erdoğan"s lead narrows with one-third of votes counted With more than a third (38.3%) of votes counted, according to the Anadolu state news agency (AA), the gap between the two leading candidates is shrinking. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now stands on 52.7%, his centre-left opposition rival Kamel Kılıçdaroğlu on 41.4%, and the nationalist Oğan on 5.4%. The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has said early results are looking positive for Kılıçdaroğlu. Faik Öztrak, the party’s spokesperson, said in a televised speech: According to the data we received so far, we see the table very positively. When the number of ballot boxes opened reaches a meaningful figure, we will start to share the number of votes. The Guardian’s video team were on the ground in Turkey last week and produced a fascinating film about the importance of the Kurdish vote in these elections. Kurdish voters, many of them anti-Erdoğan, account for about 10-15% of the country’s electorate and their ballots could prove crucial. You can watch the film here: