Turkey Chooses PM as First Elected President

Turkey's first directly elected president is no stranger to winning Turkish elections: Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been the country's prime minister since 2003. He is barred from seeking a fourth term as PM, and although the post of president has been a largely ceremonial one until now, he is expected to maximize the post's powers in what critics see as a power grab that could turn Turkey into an authoritarian state, reports the Guardian. Before this election, Turkey's president was chosen by parliamentary vote.

The 60-year-old ran a bitterly divisive campaign but sounded conciliatory in his victory speech, the AP reports. "Today the national will won once again, today democracy won once again," he said. "Those who didn't vote for me won as much as those who did; those who don't like me won as much as those who do." The vote—like recent surveys—found the country split around 50/50 on Erdogan. "He is power happy and arrogant, serving only half of the population that supports him, while the other half he deems irrelevant," a voter in Istanbul tells the New York Times. (More Recep Tayyip Erdogan stories.)