ISTANBUL — A singing, grinning President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told supporters he was ready to fight a second round in Turkey’s election on May 28, sensing he had the momentum to beat his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who undershot expectations in Sunday’s first round.

With 99 percent of ballot boxes opened, Turkey’s Supreme Election Council said on Monday that Erdoğan had won 49.4 percent of the vote, only narrowly shy of the 50 percent needed for an outright win. Kılıçdaroğlu had secured 44.96 percent, disappointing a poll consensus that he had a narrow lead.

A veteran electoral campaigner, a grandstanding Erdoğan appeared on a balcony of his AK party headquarters in Ankara in the early hours of Monday with a microphone singing “We love you so much” to the crowd and praising them for the “feast of democracy” they had just served up. Dismissing the opposition’s claims of foul play, he even predicted the final trickle of results from Sunday’s polls could push him over the 50 percent needed for another five-year stint in power.

Mocking Kılıçdaroğlu, who had filmed in his campaign ads in his modest kitchen, he said: “Some people are in the kitchen, we are on the balcony.”

“We don’t know whether the presidential election will be finished in the first round. If it ends in this round then there is no issue. If our people have decided to finish it in the second round then that’s most welcome too. We believe we will finish the election in the first round successfully.”

A visibly angry Kılıçdaroğlu, whose party accused Erdoğan’s camp of widespread electoral malpractice overnight, snapped back: “Despite all his slander and insults Erdoğan could not get the result he expected. The election cannot be won on the balcony. Data is still coming in.”

“If our people say there’s a second round, we will respect that,” the 74-year-old former bureaucrat added. “We will definitely win this election in the second round … Erdoğan didn’t win the vote of confidence he was expecting … In the next 15 days we will fight for rights, laws and justice in this country.” 

The prospect of a second round will focus attention on where the 5 percent who voted for Sinan Oğan — a nationalist former parliamentarian — will take their votes on May 28. He is styling himself as a potential kingmaker — and the nationalist movement had a strong night all round. Still, Oğan takes a hardline stance against Kurdish parties, which makes it difficult to forge an accommodation with Kılıçdaroğlu, who is relying on support from the pro-Kurdish HDP party, which is very strong in Turkey’s southeast.

World’s most important election

Turkey’s presidential election has turned into one of the world’s most closely watched political contests this year because of the massive implications both for the future of democracy in the NATO member of 85 million people and for security in Europe and the Middle East.

Heading into the vote, the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan looked more vulnerable than at any time over his 20-year dominance of Turkey’s politics because of a blazing cost of living crisis, which has pushed the prices of many staples such as onions, meat and cucumbers out of the reach of many consumers. 

However, the Islamist populist is able to rely on a strong conservative base and is still held in high esteem because of his massive infrastructure and welfare programs, along with his increased positioning of Turkey as a geopolitical heavyweight and industrial force. Most crucially, he enjoys massive sway over the media and judiciary, and has jailed key opponents.

Despite Erdoğan saying he was on course to win by a hefty margin, the opposition had been predicting it would narrow the gap because of the number of votes still to come from big cities where it is stronger. Kılıçdaroğlu accused government electoral observers of deliberately avoiding adding large numbers of votes from polling stations in opposition strongholds, by continually contesting the count there. 

He said 300 ballot boxes were being held up in Ankara, and 783 in Istanbul. “They are blocking the system at the ballot boxes where our votes are high with repeated objections,” he complained. “Don’t be afraid of the people’s will. Don’t block the people’s will. I call on democracy workers in the field not to leave the ballot boxes. We are here until every vote is counted.”

In a sign of the furor over the degree to which the AK party was demanding recounts, Yunus Başaran, a candidate for the Workers’ Party of Turkey from the southern coastal city of Antalya, said some ballot boxes had been counted seven times. “This time they’ve found this path,” he said.

Journalist Nevșin Mengü tweeted she had information that in the Ankara neighborhood of Çankaya — a traditional opposition bastion — one ballot box had been counted 11 times. Alper Taşdelen, mayor of Çankaya, said almost all of the ballot boxes there were being contested.

Anger over the count

From early evening on Sunday, the counting of the results triggered a bitter political debate.

Two of Turkey’s most senior opposition politicians, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, cried foul over the way the state-run Anadolu news agency was reporting results. This is a highly sensitive topic as Anadolu’s feed is widely used by TV channels for their live election coverage. Initially, Anadolu had put Erdoğan on course for a 54 percent to 40 percent win.

The mayors said the agency was giving an exaggerated picture of Erdoğan’s lead early in the evening by cherry-picking results only from districts where the AK party was strong. The intention was to dishearten electoral observers from the opposition camp, who would leave before all ballots had been counted, which would allow ballots to potentially be manipulated.

Kılıçdaroğlu’s opposition vowed that their officials would stay up to head off the problem. Slamming the public announcement of the results by the Anadolu agency as a “fiction,” opposition leader Kılıçdaroğlu called on his teams to stay vigilant. “We will not sleep tonight,” he said.

The opposition mayors pointed out that Anadolu had resorted to the same tactic in the mayoral elections of 2019, initially saying the votes meant the AK party was on course for big wins, while the opposition eventually took Istanbul and Ankara in late counting.

Erdoğan and his AK party officials accused the opposition of deceit by claiming that it was actually ahead, and using the fraud accusation as an excuse for losing.

“Our nation has made its decision. You don’t need to find new excuses. We will see our nation’s will when we have the final results.”

This article has been updated.