Skip to main content
Live blog update| Turkey elections 2023

Large cities key battlegrounds

Insight from Ragip Soylu, MEE’s Turkey bureau chief:

The election will be fiercely fought in large cities like Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya, where most of the population lives. Erdogan has been considerably less popular in large cities since the 2019 elections. This is why the balance may change in coming hours and Kilicdaroglu’s vote share will grow.

In Kurdish majority areas, for example, initial results suggest Kilicdaroglu had a really strong margin. He got 66.3 percent of the votes in Diyarbakir, 56 percent in Van, 55 percent in Mardin and 72 percent in Hakkari.