Will Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s lengthy tenure as Türkiye’s leader come to an end? Will the opposition bloc led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu finally defeat him in their most united form? Turkish voters will decide this Sunday in the second round of the May 28 presidential elections.

Erdoğan narrowly missed a chance to win the first round by garnering more than 49% of the vote, paving the way for a runoff. The runoff is the first since Türkiye switched to an executive presidency, which was fully implemented after Erdoğan’s election victory in 2018, after a 2017 referendum that approved changes to the system.

Erdoğan and his rival Kılıçdaroğlu, who represents a six-party opposition alliance, courted more than 64 million voters in their campaigns which were not as spectacular as those before May 14 due to the short timeframe. However, both candidates also expanded their support in the meantime, with Kılıçdaroğlu gaining the support of the Victory Party (ZP) and garnering a renewed commitment from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) while the opposition bloc remains firm behind him. Erdoğan, meanwhile, received endorsement from Sinan Oğan, his rival in the first round and a candidate backed on May 14 by the ZP’s ATA Alliance.

Voters will ultimately decide whether it will be a tight race between two contenders, but both will seek to win the votes of more than 47,000 new voters, comprised of the youth who turned 18 after May 14 and, therefore, eligible for voting. As a result, voters will also be relieved of the cumbersome duty of cramming elongated ballots with names of parties that competed for simultaneous parliamentary elections on May 14.

Overseas voting has already ended. Turkish citizens will be allowed to vote until May 28, during the same voting hours as people in Türkiye, at customs gates (airports, etc.).

The vote is critical for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the opposition. The opposition bloc is the strongest rival Erdoğan has faced in the more than a dozen elections he competed in the past two decades. The opposition sees it as the last chance to defeat Erdoğan, who has dominated the political landscape as prime minister and the president for years.

The first round of the election was held on the anniversary of the country’s first multiparty, genuinely democratic elections in 1950. The runoff will be held one day after the anniversary of the 1960 coup, which ousted the Democrat Party that came to power in the 1950 elections. Since 1960, Türkiye weathered more coups, including one against Erdoğan in 2016 but did not revert from democracy.

The candidates will secure a five-year term if they can win more than 50% of the vote in the runoff. The polls will open at 8 a.m. and close at 5 p.m. The unofficial election results are expected to be declared by the Supreme Election Council (YSK) in a few hours after the polls close.

Candidates

Erdoğan is the presidential candidate for the People’s Alliance, or "Cumhur İttifakı" as it is known in Turkish. "Cumhur" here is derived from "cumhurbaşkanı," or "president of people" in Turkish, and refers to the formal title of the president. Apart from the AK Party, the alliance consists of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a longtime ally of the AK Party, the Great Union Party (BBP), which former MHP supporters formed, and the New Welfare Party (YRP) led by Erdoğan’s mentor late Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s son Fatih Erbakan.

The Free Cause Party (HÜDA-PAR) and the Democratic Left Party (DSP) also endorse the alliance.

The 69-year-old leader, hailing from a family originally from the Black Sea region in the north, was born in Istanbul, where he grew up in a working-class neighborhood, the son of parents with modest means. Drawn to politics in his formative years, Erdoğan was an active member of a nationalist students’ union.

His oratory skills and devotion endeared Erdoğan to the National View movement of Necmettin Erbakan, a politician who served as prime minister in coalition governments and leader of different parties with a conservative base.

The charismatic local politician was picked as a candidate to run the municipality of the city. He was supported by Erbakan’s Welfare Party (RP) in 1994. An unprecedented victory in which he won over 25% of the vote against candidates of left-wing and right-wing parties, which long dominated Istanbul politics, was the first step to making Erdoğan a household name.

However, his job was difficult: improving the state of Türkiye’s most populated city, which faced myriad problems from the legacy of past administrations, such as chronic water shortages.

His accomplishments in the office helped his popularity rise but Erdoğan, for his opponents, was still a "religious conservative with a hidden agenda." At a time the government faced a coup by a powerful military irked by Erbakan’s "reactionary" ideology, an innocuous poem with "reactionary" undertones landed Erdoğan in jail in 1999, two years after he recited the "Soldier’s Prayer" by prominent Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp to an emotional crowd.

He served a four-month stint in prison but lost his job as Istanbul’s mayor.

Undaunted, Erdoğan continued his political career in a post-coup environment, joining fellow politicians planning to establish a new "conservative democracy" movement. The movement, the brainchild of Erdoğan and others from the National View and Erbakan’s parties and people alienated by post-coup politics, evolved into the AK Party.

Under Erdoğan, the AK Party gained a parliamentary majority in the 2002 elections by winning more than 34% of the vote, a surprising result for a party new to the political scene. Erdoğan was subject to a political ban due to his past prison sentence and handed over the duty of founding the government to Abdullah Gül, who later would be his predecessor as president.

An amendment in legal regulations that enforced his political ban paved the way for Erdoğan to be elected to Parliament. In 2003, Gül handed over the post of prime minister to Erdoğan, initiating the lengthy tenure of Erdoğan in the top offices of the state of Türkiye.

Erdoğan led the AK Party to more victories in local and general elections in the ensuing years. He also has the coveted title of becoming the first president directly elected by the public in 2014. Previously, the post of the Presidency had been largely ceremonial. Erdoğan’s presidency was still ceremonial, but this also changed after a 2017 referendum saw Erdoğan winning public approval for a switch to an executive presidency.

In 2018, he added another title ahead of his name: the first president of the administrative presidency system.

The 74-year-old Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded under the orders of the Republic of Türkiye’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. A former bureaucrat who Erdoğan mocks for ruining the social security agency he headed for years, Kılıçdaroğlu did not see any success at all in politics, except for succeeding the late Deniz Baykal in 2010 as leader of the CHP.

He is relatively new to the upper echelons of politics and was elected lawmaker the same year the AK Party thrust into the political scene. Carving out a public image of a man of modest means, Kılıçdaroğlu is credited with transforming the CHP from a conventional secular party with Kemalist ideology into a more "left-wing" party, alienating old supporters and finding new company and support from more far-left elements in Turkish politics. However, his attempt to draw the help of the HDP for elections angered voters.

Kılıçdaroğlu’s Nation Alliance is comprised of the Future Party (GP), the Democrat Party (DP), the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), the Good Party (IP), and the Felicity Party (SP), apart from the CHP. The DEVA and the GP are led by Ali Babacan and Ahmet Davutoğlu, respectively, two prominent former members of the AK Party who served as economy minister and prime minister. The DP is the smallest of the parties in the alliance. Meral Akşener, a former interior minister who once served in the MHP, formed the IP. The SP is led by Temel Karamollaoğlu, a former mayor and one of the parties claiming the political legacy of Necmettin Erbakan.