TURKEY’S OPPOSITION candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was on track to force Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a run-off in the country’s presidential elections, early voting data suggested. Neither man would walk away with the necessary victory margin of 50% plus one vote in the first round, it appeared. But the early numbers looked unexpectedly disappointing for the challenger, who had been running slightly ahead of the president in most of the recent opinion polls.

Hours after the voting stations closed, the results of Turkey’s most fiercely contested presidential and parliamentary elections in a generation remained up in the air. With 84% of votes counted by 10.30pm local time, the state news agency, Anadolu, showed Mr Erdogan with 50.2% of the vote, compared with 44% for Mr Kilicdaroglu, with the margin between the two shrinking steadily. A third candidate, the nationalist Sinan Ogan, had more than 5% of the vote. The opposition’s own count showed Mr Kilicdaroglu ahead, by 47.4% to Mr Erdogan’s 46.8%.

Anadolu is known to publish early results from districts that tend to vote overwhelmingly for Mr Erdogan or his party, before moving on to others. As in previous elections, the opposition has accused the agency of manipulating the vote count. “We’ve seen this movie before,” Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition mayor of Istanbul, told reporters. He was referring to his own victory in the local elections in 2019, in which the agency stopped updating the vote count as Mr Imamoglu began closing in on his rival.

The parliamentary election was also looking bad for the opposition. Anadolu showed Mr Erdogan’s own bloc, known as the People’s Alliance, led by his own Justice and Development (AK) party and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), with 51% of the vote. The opposition Nation Alliance, a coalition of six parties headed by Mr Kilicdaroglu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), had 34.2%. But that margin, too, has been closing. An alliance headed by Turkey’s main Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), expected to back the opposition bloc, had 9.3%.

In case a run-off becomes necessary, Mr Ogan may be able to play kingmaker. In an interview a couple of days before the elections, the nationalist candidate suggested that he and his party may be eyeing ministerial posts in exchange for an endorsement.

Elections in Turkey have become perhaps the last valve for dissent. But Turks have not given up on democracy, the turnout in the elections showed. More than 88% of eligible voters went to the polls on May 14th, a very high number by any standards. Despite high tensions, no violent incidents took place on election day.

Polls published a couple of days before the elections had shown the opposition’s umbrella candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, with just over 50% of the vote, enough to win in the first round, and a few percentage points ahead of Erdogan, who has run the country for 20 years. This came after Muharrem Ince, a former opposition CHP politician and potential spoiler candidate, dropped out of the race three days before the elections. Mr Kilicdaroglu was believed to have inherited most of Mr Ince’s support, thought to be around 2%.

The stakes in the election could not be much higher. The outcome will determine the direction of Turkey’s foreign policy, especially its increasingly cosy relationship with Russia, and the shape of its economy, currently warped by galloping inflation and the lowest real interest rates anywhere in the world. A constitution that allows Mr Erdogan to keep the courts, the central bank, and other state institutions under his thumb, as well as the patronage system over which he presides, are on the line, too. Five more years of rule by Mr Erdogan would entrench his brand of autocracy. An opposition victory offers a chance to restore democratic rule, and a path to economic stability.

The election campaign had been uncharacteristically sombre in its early stages, largely as a result of the earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people in the south of the country at the start of the year. That changed once Mr Erdogan accused the opposition of teaming up with “terrorists”, a reference to the HDP, which most Turks see as the political wing of an outlawed Kurdish insurgent group, and of courting “deviant” LGBT groups. His interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, fanned tensions by warning of a “political coup attempt” on election night. A week before the elections, pro-government protesters attacked an opposition rally in the east of the country, wounding about a dozen people.

Mr Erdogan and his party also framed Mr Ince’s withdrawal from the race as an attempt by exiled supporters of the Gulen community, a religious sect Turkey blames for a violent coup attempt in 2016, to shape the race in Mr Kilicdaroglu’s favour. Mr Ince accuses the Gulenists of mounting an online smear campaign, featuring doctored photos and videos, which he says forced him to drop out of the race. The government has amplified Mr Ince’s claims. “The perpetrators are [the Gulenists] and America,” Mr Soylu said on May 12th. Mr Kilicdaroglu, meanwhile, has accused Russia of interfering in the elections on Mr Erdogan’s behalf. ■