Recep Tayyip Erdogan beats his challenger as Turkey votes

THE air seemed to go out of the 16-storey building in eastern Ankara, the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition party, late on May 14th. Opinion polls had given Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the party’s leader and the opposition’s joint candidate for the presidential elections, a decent lead over Turkey’s longtime leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the first round of the contest. Some even saw him winning an outright majority of the vote, enough to claim immediate victory. Nothing of the sort happened. By the time dawn broke over the city, Mr Kilicdaroglu had secured only 44.9%, compared to 49.5% for Mr Erdogan. That was enough to force the Turkish strongman into a run-off on May 28th, but not enough to prevent a sense of despair from spreading through the halls of the CHP building. Mr Erdogan now has a clear path to re-election. Mr Kilicdaroglu’s chances of pulling off a historic upset are thin.