Elections in Turkey: presidential election goes to a second round
Parliamentary and presidential elections were held in Turkey on the 14th of May. We have earlier reported on the call of the TKP/ML to boycott the election. The current president Erdoğan received 49,51% of the votes, his rival Kılıçdaroğlu 44,88% of the votes and the third candidate Oğan 5.17%. This means a second round of presidential elections will be held on the 28th of May. In the simultaneous parliamentary elections Erdoğan’s AKP took the majority in the parliament with 321 seats of 600. The turnout was 88%, around the same as the last elections, and 1,369,198 votes were deemed invalid of around 54,619,509 votes in total.
The newspaper Yeni Demokrasi points out that the election results clearly showed that a wrong, class-collaborative and parliamentary-cretinist orientation, which abandons the struggle of the people, had big problems in the election, in the power-struggle of the different reactionary cliques. The HDP or the Green Left Party (YSP), which supports Kurdish nationalists, received the lowest amount of votes in four elections. The Alliance for Labor and Freedom relatively lost its support. What is notable in the case of the HDP/Green Left is that especially in the Turkish Kurdistan the participation was below average, which means that the party failed to mobilize the Kurds to the elections. This trend could be seen despite reports of irregularities and ”accidentally” recording the votes for the YSP as votes for the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party; party which set Oğan as its presidential candidate).
In some areas, large-scale boycott was seen. Yeni Demokrasi reports on the Ergözü (Tabo) village of Eleşkirt district of Ağrı, whose residents boycotted the election. 570 of the villagers are eligible to vote. Earlier, many have supported the AKP or other reactionary parties, but as the parties have done nothing to build a road demanded by the villagers for years, they decided to boycott.
State terror against the people was witnessed on the election night. The police fired tear gas on the streets and drove around with armoured vehicles in Şırnak, Cizre, Kızıltepe and Silopi. In Mardin/Kızıltepe the police attacked people for no obvious reason. In Şırnak, group of people reported to be AKP supporters fired in the air for hours to intimidate people. In Haliliye, Urfa, a person was abducted by four people possibly connected to earlier murders carried out by the State.
