Erdogan Wins Turkish Presidential Vote

[Purveyor]

Source: USA TODAY

ISTANBUL — Turkish voters elected Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday to become the country's first directly elected president, the head of Turkey's election commission said.

Sadi Guven said Sunday night that "it is understood that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won an absolute majority of the votes." He said the official vote count would be announced on Monday.

"The people showed their will at the polls today," Erdogan said in a brief speech Sunday evening before thousands of supporters in Istanbul.

The main opposition candidate, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, also conceded to Erdogan.

With more than 95% of ballots counted, Erdogan received nearly 52% of the vote, eliminating the need for a second round of voting, according to an unofficial tally by the state-run Anadolu news agency, which had reporters in vote counting centers across the country and declared Erdogan the winner.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/08/10/turkey-presidential-election/13865525/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories

[kelliekat44]

1. What is he like? His politics? His religon? Conservative/liberal/fascist??? nt

[Berlin Expat]

2. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

has been Prime Minister of Turkey since 2003, when his party, the Justice and Development Party, swept to power in elections.

The AKP arose from the ashes of the Islamist Virtue Party, which was banned in 2001; the Virtue Party was closely affiliated with Milli Görüs, a Turkish nationalist/Islamist diaspora organization quite prominent in Europe.

As for the AKP, they fall on the center-right of the political spectrum; their ideology is economic liberalism, social conservatism and they are pro-EU. They are also the ruling party and they are quite popular, though perhaps not so popular with everyone, but the party's strength is in the deeply conservative hinterlands of Anatolia.

Their foreign policy has been described as neo-Ottomanism, though the AKP denies it; however, knowing plenty of Turks as I did when I lived in Berlin, many of who were AKP activists (and a few from Milli Görüs as well)...yeah, it's totally neo-Ottomanist. Basically, neo-Ottomanism looks like this:

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and it's a potent idea that's embraced by a pretty broad cross-section of the Turkish public.

EDIT: Allow me to add that the neo-Ottomanist ideal - the Turkish-Islamic Union - is a democratic structure along the lines of the European Union, with Istanbul being the "capital" much like Brussels is the capital of the EU. So it's not like the classical Ottoman Empire, but more along the lines of a democratic confederation, with each member-state having its own laws, culture, etc., but with free trade throughout the Union and visa and passport requirements abolished. Interestingly, they have made some progress on that latter part - there are currently a few countries that no longer require visas or passports to enter for Turks and vice-versa.

No one is surprised Erdoğan won; he was widely expected to.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Thank you for this info!

nt