Turkish citizens based abroad began voting on Saturday in Turkey’s presidential runoff election between the incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who aims to bring an end to the president’s two-decade rule.
The runoff election will be held in Turkey on May 28 after Erdogan fell just short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win the presidential vote outright last Sunday in what had been expected to be his greatest ever political challenge.
Some 3.4 million Turks are eligible to vote abroad, out of a total electorate of more than 64 million and will cast their ballots from May 20-24.
State-owned Anadolu news agency said voting had started in countries across Asia and Europe. Germany is home to the world’s largest Turkish diaspora, where there are some 1.5 million Turkish citizens eligible to vote
Kilicdaroglu, candidate of a six-party opposition alliance, won 44.88 percent support in the presidential election, trailing Erdogan on 49.52 percent and confounding expectations in opinion polls that the challenger would come out ahead.