Recep Tayyip Erdogan beats his challenger as Turkey votes

THE airCHPCHP CHP AKMHPHDP seemed to go out of the 16-storey building in eastern Ankara, the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party (), Turkey’s main opposition party, late on May 14th. Opinion polls had given , the party’s leader and the opposition’s joint candidate for the , a decent lead over Turkey’s longtime leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the first round of the contest. Some even saw him winning an outright majority of the vote, enough to claim immediate victory. Nothing of the sort happened. By the time dawn broke over the city, Mr Kilicdaroglu had secured only 44.9%, compared to 49.5% for Mr Erdogan. That was enough to force the Turkish strongman into a run-off on May 28th, but not enough to prevent a sense of despair from spreading through the halls of the building. Mr Erdogan now has a clear path to re-election. Mr Kilicdaroglu’s chances of pulling off a historic upset are thin.The elections to parliament, held in tandem with the ones for the top office, compounded the damage. The Nation Alliance, a coalition of six opposition parties headed by the and the centre-right Good Party (Iyi), won 35% of the vote, also well below expectations, which will give it 212 out of 600 seats. Mr Erdogan’s bloc, which includes his Justice and Development () party and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (), took 49.5%, enough to retain a comfortable majority with 323 seats. A smaller opposition alliance headed by Turkey’s main Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (), won 10.6% (65 seats).