President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan makes a statement regarding the Presidential Election and 28th Term Parliamentary General Election.
After signing the election decision at the Presidential Complex, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated the following;
Dear nation, esteemed members of the press, I greet you with my most heartfelt feelings. I have just signed the decision to renew the Presidential and Parliamentary elections on 14 May, which should have been held on 18 June 2023, with the authority granted by Article 116 of our constitution.
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Following this decision, which will be published in the official gazette tomorrow, YSK will start the 2-month election calendar. Accordingly, I hope that on 14 May 2023, the first Sunday after 2 months, our nation will go to the polls to elect the President and MPs.
As it is known, we shared our decision to update the date of the elections as 14 May with the public just after the New Year. Some of the reasons that led us to take the decision to bring the election date forward by about a month are as follows; First of all, 18 June was a date that coincided with the university exam calendar, which concerns the future of millions of young people. Again, this date coincided with a period when hundreds of thousands of our citizens at home and abroad travelled to the blessed lands to perform the pilgrimage. Due to the fact that primary and secondary schools went on holiday just before the election date, millions of our citizens would set off for their hometowns or holiday resorts this year as they do every year. For these reasons, we considered that 18 June was not a healthy date for our nation to reflect its will to the ballot box.
As an alternative, we proposed the date of 14 May. We know that this date, which corresponds to a meaningful anniversary in terms of our democratic history, is well accepted by our nation. However, the two major earthquakes that our country experienced one after the other on 6 February removed the discussions about the election and the election date from our agenda. This earthquake, which is described as the disaster of the century, caused heartbreaking loss of life and property in Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, Adıyaman, Gaziantep, Malatya, Osmaniye, Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Kilis, Adana and Elazığ. Although the severe winter conditions in the first days of the earthquake, the damaged infrastructure and the size of the destruction area of 500 kilometres made our work very difficult, we rushed to the aid of our people by either finding a way or opening a road. In the earthquake, which directly affected 14 million citizens living in these 11 provinces, more than 47 thousand people died and more than 115 thousand people were rescued with injuries.
