Counting had not even concluded in Turkey’s run-off election on Sunday night when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan climbed atop a bus in his hometown of Istanbul to declare victory.

“We shall be collectively to the grave,” Erdoğan proclaimed to booming applause earlier than flying to Ankara, the capital metropolis, to ship a proper victory speech to a big crowd of supporters from the balcony of his sprawling 1,100-room palace.

Erdoğan’s win in Sunday’s bitterly fought run-off election towards Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu will give the president, Turkey’s most influential politician since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who based the republic a century in the past, a recent mandate to form the nation of 85mn folks. But it surely additionally threatens to deepen the nation’s divide alongside ideological traces.

“He’s managed to separate Turkey . . . into two blocs: for or towards Erdoğan,” stated Emre Peker at Eurasia Group. “Even with Turkey going via its worst financial interval because the 2001 monetary disaster, Erdoğan can nonetheless win elections on identification politics.”

Erdoğan’s staunchest supporters, a big bloc of pious, conservative voters in Turkey’s huge Anatolian heartland, are betting the 69-year-old will observe via on his nationalist vows, constructing Turkey right into a extra forceful participant in worldwide politics and the worldwide financial system.

Critics fret that his re-election, which extends his rule into a 3rd decade, will speed up a slide in the direction of autocracy and reinforce his desire for unorthodox financial insurance policies which have ignited a painful value of residing disaster and despatched the lira tumbling to document lows.

However Kılıçdaroğlu’s warning that the election was a final probability to “shut the gates of hell” did not resonate with most Turks, lots of whom really feel an emotional reference to their chief of 20 years, stated Tarık Oğuzlu, a professor at Istanbul Aydın College.

“Folks clearly didn’t purchase the opposition’s argument that this was a referendum between democracy or intolerant authoritarianism,” he stated. “A number of elements of society have benefited from a switch of wealth that [Erdoğan] was in a position to exploit throughout the marketing campaign, warning: ‘If I go away, you’ll lose what you’ve gained’.”

Kılıçdaroğlu, backed by a six-party opposition alliance, scored solely 47.9 per cent of the vote in Sunday’s second-round presidential election, in contrast with 52.1 per cent for Erdoğan, in response to provisional figures from Turkey’s election board. The parliamentary alliance led by the ruling Justice and Improvement occasion, which Erdoğan first led to energy in 2002, additionally carried out nicely within the first spherical of elections on Could 14, retaining its majority within the legislative department.

Election observers have argued that whereas voting in Turkey stays largely free, Erdoğan enjoys unfair benefits, together with an obedient mainstream press that largely ignored the opposition and the usage of state funds for a raft of pre-election giveaways.

That spending, and Erdoğan’s growth-at-all-costs technique for the financial system, means he should now reckon with Turkey’s monetary hangover.

Overseas traders have fled Turkey’s markets lately, with holdings of the nation’s shares and bonds sinking to historic lows as worries develop over Erdoğan’s financial insurance policies, together with his insistence that rate of interest cuts would treatment Turkey’s runaway inflation.

Issues have mounted this 12 months as Turkey has burned via $24bn in overseas foreign money reserves because the finish of 2022 because it makes an attempt to prop up the lira and finance a present account deficit that’s working close to document ranges. The federal government has needed to resort to an ever-growing variety of different instruments in an try and preserve the financial system on a good keel.

Turkey’s bonds have sustained a blow whereas the fee to insure towards default has leapt greater because it turned clear after the primary spherical of elections on Could 14 that Erdoğan was prone to stay at Turkey’s helm.

The president in his victory speech on Sunday night appeared to double down on his signature insurance policies, saying addressing inflation and the squeeze on residing prices have been “essentially the most pressing issues for the approaching days”. 

“If anybody can do that, I can do it,” he stated. “[The central bank’s main policy rate] has now been diminished to eight.5 per cent and also you’ll see inflation may even fall.”

But luring again traders may even require repairing frayed ties with Turkey’s conventional companions, stated Jay Truesdale, chief government of the political danger consultancy Veracity Worldwide. Dropping opposition to Sweden’s Nato entry would “assist start to thaw a number of the very icy relationships Turkey has with its allies, who see Erdoğan pursuing insurance policies that he assesses to be in Turkey’s nationwide pursuits, not essentially within the curiosity of its alliances”.

After boasting of congratulatory calls coming in from leaders around the globe, Erdoğan advised supporters on Sunday that “no one can wag their finger at Turkey”. That mission to make Turkey seem a much bigger, impartial participant in worldwide affairs is prone to stay a precedence, analysts stated.

“By the point he’s finished, he’d like to have the ability to say the nation is now not depending on its western treaty allies, free to be its personal axis,” stated Selim Koru, an analyst on the Ankara-based Tepav think-tank.

Oğuzlu of Istanbul Aydın College added that Ankara’s overseas coverage of “strategic autonomy” would proceed. “The connection with the US and EU will proceed to be transactional, not one primarily based on widespread values.”

Erdoğan’s shift to core conservative values included recruiting a small occasion to his alliance that argues girls don’t belong within the office. He has sharpened his rhetoric towards minority teams and on Sunday railed towards political rivals claiming they have been “LGBT”.

He additionally vowed he would by no means launch Selahattin Demirtaş, a preferred Kurdish politician jailed in 2016 for his political speeches.

“One factor Erdoğan has fairly undoubtedly is a imaginative and prescient for the long run,” Koru stated. “His genius is being very gradual about it. One step at a time.”

Further reporting by Funja Güler in Ankara