Turks are voting on Sunday in parliamentary and presidential elections which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes will boost his strength and that of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP.
More than 56.3 million Turkish citizens are eligible to cast their ballots in the polls, which are being held a year and a half ahead of schedule.
Erdogan said in April when announcing the decision to hold early polls that they were necessary to “overcome uncertainty” in the country.
Voters will elect a new parliament and a new president, who will inherit the new executive presidential system, which was confirmed by a narrow margin in a controversial referendum last year and will become effective after the upcoming ballot.
The elections were scheduled as politically-divided Turkey was facing a growing economic and social crisis, a widening rift with the West, the ongoing migrant crisis and continuing involvement in military operations in Syria and Iraq.
The decision to hold early polls came soon after Erdogan and his AKP secured a coalition agreement with two nationalist parties under the banner of the People’s Alliance.
The announcement that the polls would be held early gave the opposition little time to prepare, but numerous opinion surveys in the last two months have suggested the presidential race could be tight and that a second-round run-off is very possible.
“The polls vary, but one thing in common in most of them is that Erdogan cannot win in the first round. It seems that Kurdish votes and the performance of the united opposition will decide the results,” Gul Uret, a researcher at the Centre for South East European Studies at the University of Graz, told BIRN.
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