Turkish citizens in Kurdistan vote early in Turkey elections
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turks residing in the Kurdistan Region headed to their country's consulate in Erbil on Sunday morning to cast their votes for the presidential and general elections.
The snap polls scheduled for June 24 are held earlier for citizens living abroad.
In the Kurdistan Region, about 2,500 people were registered to vote, according to a Turkish consulate official who spoke with Kurdistan 24.
Voter turnout, however, seemed to be low in the early morning hours.
People can vote until 9:00 PM, local time, in Erbil and in the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad, where the rest of Turkish nationals living in Iraq are registered.
Some 59 million voters in Turkey and abroad are heading to the ballot box to elect 600 lawmakers, and a new President whose office was empowered by last year's referendum on constitutional changes.
Two months ago, the incumbent President and leader of the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called a snap election – originally set to take place in 2019 – after his far-right nationalist allies urged so.
He is competing with the secularist People's Republican Party (CHP) candidate Muharrem Ince, and pro-Kurdish, left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party's (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas, who is running a campaign while detained in a Turkish prison over his previous speeches and rallies.
Other rivals are Islamist Saadet (Felicity) Party's Temel Karamollaoglu, ultra-nationalist IYI (Good) Party's Meral Aksener, and the fiercely anti-Western, pro-Eurasian Vatan (Patriotic) Party's veteran leftist leader, Dogu Perincek.
The AKP is in an alliance with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and nationalist-Islamist Great Unity Party (BBP).
The main opposition, the CHP, on the other hand, formed an alliance with the Felicity and Good parties.
The HDP is entering the elections on its own and thus faces a possibility of not making it into Parliament if it fails to garner a nationwide threshold of ten percent of all votes, the highest among the world's democracies.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and other international watchdogs have warned of an uneven playing field for the opposition as the country heads to the polls under an ongoing state of emergency.
The continued detention of Demirtas, public-funded state media's perceived bias in favor of Erdogan, and privately-owned media outlets' reduced coverage of opposition parties are cited as factors contributing to the unbalanced election campaigns.
Editing by Nadia Riva