A woman takes ballots at a polling station in Istanbul to vote in the parliamentary and presidental elections in Turkey, on May 14, 2023. Photo by OZAN KOSE / AFP
Istanbul: Turkish polling stations closed Sunday in a knife-edge election that could end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's two-decade grip on power and put the mostly Muslim nation on a more secular course.
Turnout was expected to be huge in what has effectively become a referendum on Turkiye's longest-serving leader and his Islamic-rooted party.
It is the toughest of more than a dozen votes the 69-year-old leader has confronted -- one that polls hint he might lose.
"We need change, we've had enough," farmer Mehmet Topaloglu told AFP after voting amid the ruins left by a deadly February earthquake that razed the ancient city of Antakya and other parts of the southeast.
More religious voters are also grateful for his decision to lift secular-era restrictions on headscarves and introduce more Islamic schools.
"My hope to God is that after the counting concludes this evening, the outcome is good for the future of our country, for Turkish democracy," Erdogan said after casting his ballot in Istanbul.
- 'We all miss democracy' -Erdogan's first decade of economic revival and warming relations with Europe was followed by a second one filled with social and political turmoil.
He responded to a failed 2016 coup attempt with sweeping purges that sent chills through Turkish society and made him an increasingly uncomfortable partner for the West.
The emergence of Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his six-party opposition alliance -- a group that forms the type of broad-based coalition that Erdogan excelled at forging throughout his career -- gives foreign allies and Turkish voters a clear alternative.
Polls suggest the 74-year-old secular leader is within touching distance of breaking the 50-percent threshold needed to win in the first round.
A runoff on May 28 could give Erdogan time to regroup and reframe the debate.
But he would still be hounded by Turkey's most dire economic crisis of his time in power, and disquiet over his government's stuttering response to the earthquake that claimed more than 50,000 lives.
