End of campaign in view of second round of elections in Turkey

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%.