The voting process began at 8:00 am today, Sunday, in the 28th session of the presidential and parliamentary elections throughout Turkey, and voting continues until 5:00 pm, local time.
The Turkish President is competing for the presidency, the candidate of the People's Alliance, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who aspires to win a second and final term after the country's transition to the presidential system, the candidate of the People's Alliance and the leader of the Republican People's Party, Kamal Kiliçdaroglu, and the candidate of the Grandfathers' Alliance, Sinan Ogan, while the candidate of the Country Party, Muharram Ince, withdrew last Friday. 24 political parties competed for parliamentary seats.
Turkish voters will cast their votes in more than 191 thousand ballot boxes throughout Turkey in order to elect a president for the country for a period of 5 years, and to choose members of Parliament consisting of 600 members, where 60 million and 697 thousand 843 voters are expected to cast their votes, of whom 4 million 904 thousand 672 voters will vote for the first time.
The Turkish High Election Authority took various measures in the 11 states affected by the earthquake, to conduct the elections properly in prefabricated centers designated for that.
24 political parties and 151 independent candidates are running in the general elections, while some political parties entered the elections in five different alliances under the names of the “Alliance of the People”, “The Nation’s Alliance”, “The Ata (ancestors) Alliance”, “The Labor and Freedom Alliance” and “Ittihad”. socialist forces.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ended the last days of his election campaign with sunset prayers yesterday at the Hagia Sophia Mosque, which is a symbol of the conquest of Constantinople in the 15th century - to hold prayers, in a historic decision since it was converted into a museum in 1934.
Before his prayers in the Hagia Sophia, Erdogan held several mass meetings in the neighborhoods of Istanbul, where he addressed the crowds in Umraniye, Sanjak Tepe, as well as in Qasim Pasha, the neighborhood he used to live in in his youth.
On the other hand, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu - Erdogan's main rival - concluded his election campaign with a symbolic visit to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who is described as the founder of modern Turkey in the capital, Ankara, where Kiliçdaroglu walked to the mausoleum among a crowd of young people, then laid flowers on Ataturk's grave.
In his latest activities on social media platforms, Kiliçdaroglu published a video clip in which he said that the most "crazy" projects he had prepared for Turkey were democracy and freedom.
Source: National Iraqi News Agency
