At least five people were killed today as Turks voted in local elections likely to give the ruling AK Party a new mandate to press on with key reforms in the European Union candidate country.
The deaths took place in the mainly Kurdish southeast as rival supporters for non-party village chief posts clashed in several villages, security and hospital sources told Reuters. Nearly 100 people were wounded in the violence.
The southeast is one of the main battlegrounds of the elections because Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan hopes to wrest the region from pro-Kurdish parties in what might prove a historic step towards solving a deadly conflict weighing heavily on the country's economic and political development.
Voters in the predominantly Muslim country of 72 million people elect mayors and municipal and provincial assemblies, but the vote was seen more as a referendum on the popular Erdogan.
The Islamist-rooted AK Party has won three straight elections since it first crushed secularists in 2002.
Most opinion polls show it winning the local polls with about 40 percent of the vote despite record unemployment and an economy hit by the global economic crisis, after years of high economic growth and record foreign investment.
Polls closed at 2pm Irish time. Initial results are expected to come out later this evening.
Erdogan has pledged to reform the constitution drafted by the military in 1982 and change the way the Constitutional Court works, steps which would remove some obstacles to EU membership but could revive tensions with secularists who accuse him of pursuing an Islamist agenda. Erdogan denies this.
"Our people's decision will emerge today and all political parties will respect this," Erdogan said after casting his vote.
Campaigning had much of the atmosphere of a general election, rather than that of of a local vote. Candidates traded accusations of corruption.