Armed police officers and blockades of the polling stations: The reports by election observers from the Left Party in Turkey paint a bad picture.
The whole world is watching the elections in Turkey. While the votes are still being counted, the first irregularities are already being reported. The government and opposition are accusing each other of sabotage – and election observers are reporting on social media about possible election manipulation and blocked counts.
In addition, a dispute over the election results is looming – after counting more than 90 percent of the votes, the state media saw the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the lead, while the opposition with its top candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu claimed leadership (read more about him here preliminary results). President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke up on Twitter in the evening. The elections took place in a “positive and democratic atmosphere,” he wrote.
But reports by envoys from the Left Party painted a different picture: Left Party leader Janine Wissler reported to the afp news agency that election observers from a party delegation had been prevented from entering the polling stations by armed police officers. The observers from Germany deployed in the Kurdish areas in the east of the country generally reported a high presence of armed police officers and soldiers.
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High presence of armed police and soldiers
Hakan Tas, an election observer on behalf of the left, explained that not only German but also Turkish independent election observers were denied access to polling stations. As a result, the police and military flouted the agreement with the electoral commission, he told the AFP news agency by telephone. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who are monitoring Turkey’s elections with a total of 400 experts, were hardly represented in the Kurdish areas, Tas added.
Tas also reported on clashes in and in front of some election offices, mainly triggered by supporters of the Islamic conservative ruling party AKP, which led to their temporary closures, whereupon “the already very long queues in front of the election offices got even longer,” said Tas.
The left-wing delegation was there with 19 election observers at the invitation of the left-wing Turkish Yesil Sol Partisi. The sister party of the left in Turkey is the pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP.
News agencies present different figures
Frank Schwabe, who observed the election for the Council of Europe, told ARD that overall everything went well. “But there are definitely one or two cases where you have to take a closer look.”
The government and opposition accuse each other of sabotage
The reports by independent election observers are particularly explosive: a bitter dispute over the election results is emerging. If none of the three candidates gets more than 50 percent of the votes, the two leading candidates will go to a runoff on May 28th.
The AKP spokesman Ömer Celik accused the CHP around Kılıçdaroğlu of sabotage. CHP politician Ekrem Imamoglu, meanwhile, accused government agencies of disseminating false preliminary figures that glossed over the values of official Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Both sides said they would see themselves ahead of the polls.
Erdoğan himself accused the opposition of wanting to announce the results of the election prematurely. He spoke of a “robbery of the national will”. He also called on people not to lose sight of the countless ballot boxes. A similar call had previously come from challenger Kılıçdaroğlu.
The elections in Turkey are considered trend-setting and, due to the expected domestic and foreign policy effects, one of the most important in the world this year. Since the introduction of a presidential system five years ago, 69-year-old Erdoğan has never had more power. Critics fear that the country, with a population of around 85 million, could slip completely into autocracy if Erdoğan were re-elected. The vote in the NATO country is also being closely observed internationally.
