The population of Turkey went to the polls this Sunday in the second round of the presidential election in which the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, aspires to extend his stay in power for five years against the opponent Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, after staying close to a direct victory in the first round.

More of 60 million people are called to cast their vote during this Sunday in the nearly 190,800 ballot boxes that have been set up in the different polling stations in Turkey on a voting day that began around 08:00 a.m. (local time), the agency has reported Anatolian News.

Erdogan, who has been at the forefront of Turkish politics for two decades, first as prime minister and then as president, won in the first round more than 27.1 million votes, which meant the 49.52% of the ballots, just days after letting slip that he could work to amend the Constitution and remove the requirement to gain more than half of the votes to be declared the winner, at a time when the polls pointed to a very tight race between the two candidates.

Kiliçdaroglu, who stood in the elections with the support of the Table of Six and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), who initially opted not to present a candidate and later to ask for the vote for the leader of the Republican Party of the People (CHP), has attempted scratch votes among the nationalist sectors Turks to pass Erdogan.

Thus, during the last days it has hardened his speech against migration and refugees, whom he has brought to the forefront of political debate, going so far as to promise that he will expel “everyone” if he is victorious and to place the number of refugees in Turkey at ten million, a figure that is far from that provided by the United Nations.

The huge discrepancies in the figures stem from the fact that politicians and media use the term “refugees” to also refer to asylum seekers, people under temporary protection and migrants in an irregular situation.

Turkey established a geographical limitation on its ratification of the UN refugee convention, which dates back to 1951, ensuring that it affected only people fleeing for “Events in Europe”.

The ultranationalist Sinan Ogan, who came third in the first round of the presidential elections, gave his support to Erdogan for the second roundwhile the leader of the far-right Victory Party, Umit Ozdag, announced that he would support his opponent, Kiliçdaroglu.