Turnout: 86.24%
About this election
Turkey held its first presidential election under the new executive system on 24 June 2018, brought forward from 2019 in a snap vote called by President Erdoğan. Erdoğan won outright in the first round with 52.59%, avoiding a runoff. Muharrem İnce of the Republican People's Party (CHP) took 30.64%, the imprisoned Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş of the HDP 8.40%, and Meral Akşener of the newly founded Good Party (İYİ) 7.29%. Turnout was 86.24%. The election inaugurated the executive presidency approved in the 2017 referendum.
This was the election that brought Turkey's executive presidency into being. Under the system approved in 2017, the president is both head of state and head of government, with no prime minister; he appoints the cabinet and vice-presidents, issues decrees, and is elected directly for a five-year term, renewable once, with a two-round system requiring an absolute majority to win. Presidential and parliamentary elections are held on the same day, and the 2018 vote was the first to combine them.
Erdoğan called the election more than a year early, citing the need to complete the transition to the new system and pointing to economic headwinds — a sliding lira and rising inflation — that were expected to worsen. The country was still under the state of emergency declared after the 2016 coup attempt. The snap timing caught a fragmented opposition off guard, though it responded with unexpected energy.
Erdoğan ran as the candidate of the People's Alliance of his AKP and the MHP. The CHP's Muharrem İnce, a combative former physics teacher, ran an energetic campaign drawing huge rallies. Selahattin Demirtaş campaigned from prison, where he had been held since 2016. Meral Akşener, a former interior minister who had broken from the MHP, stood for her new Good Party. Temel Karamollaoğlu of the Islamist Felicity Party and Doğu Perinçek of the left-nationalist Patriotic Party completed the field.
Despite the opposition's vigour, Erdoğan retained overwhelming advantages in media coverage and state resources, and the emergency-rule context constrained the campaign. İnce's final rally in İstanbul drew enormous crowds and briefly raised opposition hopes of forcing a second round, but the combined strength of the People's Alliance proved decisive.
By winning more than half the vote in the first round, Erdoğan secured a five-year term as Turkey's first executive president and, with the People's Alliance also winning a parliamentary majority the same day, consolidated control of both branches under the new system. The office of prime minister was abolished, and Erdoğan formed a cabinet of his own choosing, marking the formal end of Turkey's parliamentary era.
In the 2014 presidential election — the first held by direct popular vote — Erdoğan had won 51.79% in the first round. The 2018 result confirmed and slightly extended that majority, now exercised through a vastly more powerful office.
Muharrem İnce's candidacy briefly energised the opposition in a way the CHP had not managed for years. A blunt, plain-speaking orator, he toured the country drawing crowds estimated in the millions at his final rallies in İzmir and İstanbul, and he reached out beyond the CHP's secular base to religious and conservative voters. But his momentum could not overcome the structural advantages of incumbency, and on election night his early silence and apparent concession demoralised supporters who had hoped at least to force a runoff.
One of the most striking features of the election was that the HDP's candidate, Selahattin Demirtaş, ran his entire campaign from a prison cell in Edirne, where he had been held since November 2016 on terrorism-related charges that the European Court of Human Rights would later rule were politically motivated. Unable to hold rallies or appear on most television, he communicated through letters, his lawyers and brief video messages, yet still won 8.4% — a measure both of the loyalty of the Kurdish electorate and of the severe constraints under which the entire opposition was forced to operate during the campaign.
Turnout of 86.24% was characteristically high, reflecting both Turkey's strong participatory tradition and the magnitude of an election that launched a new constitutional order.
A central reason Erdoğan brought the election forward was the state of the economy. The lira had been sliding for months, inflation was climbing into double digits, and investors were nervous about the president's well-known hostility to high interest rates. By voting before conditions deteriorated further, the government sought to lock in a mandate that would carry it through the turbulence ahead — a calculation that proved shrewd in the short term, even as the currency crisis it anticipated duly arrived weeks after the vote and deepened over the years that followed.
Supreme Election Council of Turkey (YSK) — ysk.gov.tr.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.