Turks in Switzerland back opposition presidential candidate
The vote is seen as one of the most important in Turkish history
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Were the Turkish president elected only by Turkish voters living in Switzerland, his name would be Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The Turkish opposition candidate won 57.6% of their votes, clearly more than current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on 40.3%.
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Keystone-SDA/Reuters/ts
The third candidate, Sinan Ogan, received 1.4% of the votes and Muharrem Ince 0.7%, the Turkish embassy in Bern told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA on Monday. These results were provisional, it added.
Turnout among the 106,000 eligible voters in Switzerland was 56.8%.
Turks were able to cast their votes at three locations: at the embassy in Bern, at the consulate in Geneva and in Zurich. Erdogan won in Geneva, Kilicdaroglu in Bern and Zurich.
A different picture emerged in the parliamentary elections: Erdogan’s AKP party won 30.4% of the votes of Turks living in Switzerland. Kilicdaroglu’s CHP got 26.2% and the YSP, a pro-Kurdish green party, 25%.
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Overall, Erdogan led comfortably on Monday after the first round of Turkey’s presidential election, with his rival facing an uphill struggle to prevent the president extending his rule into a third decade in a runoff vote on May 28.
With most votes counted in the presidential contest, Erdogan had 49.51% and Kilicdaroglu 44.88%.
Turkish assets weakened on the news, which showed Erdogan only just below the 50% threshold needed to avoid sending the NATO-member country to a second round of a presidential election viewed as passing judgment on his autocratic rule.
Critics fear that Erdogan, a veteran of a dozen election victories, will govern ever more autocratically if he wins another five-year term. Erdogan says he respects democracy.
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