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ISTANBUL Turkish voters will vote Sunday in a historic double election for the presidency and parliament.

The vote will be a game changer, putting into full force constitutional changes transforming Turkey's ruling system into an executive presidency. It will either solidify President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grip on the nation of 81 million people, or restrain his political ambitions.

The elections are taking place 16 months earlier than scheduled, amid a lengthy state of emergency and signs of a declining economy.

Here is a look at the key facts:

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THE VOTERS

More than 59 million Turkish citizens, including some 3 million living abroad, are eligible to vote in the June 24 elections.

Voting will last from 0500 GMT to 1400 GMT across the country in some 181,000 polling stations. Voting in 60 countries for expatriate Turks ended Tuesday but voters can cast their ballots at Turkey's border crossings until the official end of the election.

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PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

Six candidates are running for a five-year presidential term. The leading contender is incumbent Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor who rose to the helm of national politics when he became prime minister in 2003 and then, in 2014, became the first directly elected president.

A candidate must secure more than 50 percent of the vote for an outright win. If that threshold is not reached, a second round will take place on July 8 between the two leading contenders.

The main challenge to Erdogan comes from a dynamic former physics teacher, Muharrem Ince, who was nominated by the leading opposition party.

Also running is Meral Aksener, a former interior minister.

A pro-Kurdish human rights lawyer, Selahattin Demirtas, is leading his campaign via social media from jail.

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THE EXECUTIVE PRESIDENCY

Constitutional amendments narrowly approved in a contentious referendum last year will take effect with these elections, transforming Turkey's parliamentary governing system into an executive presidency.

Abolishing the position of prime minister, the president will take over the executive branch and form the government, appoint ministers, vice presidents and high-level bureaucrats, issue decrees, prepare the budget and decide on security policies. The president can also dissolve parliament by calling for early elections, but that would also shorten his or her term.

Under the new system, parliament proposes laws, has the power to ratify or reject the president's budget or move for new dual elections.

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THE PARLIAMENTARY VOTE

Turks will also elect 600 lawmakers to parliament, with eight parties and independent candidates competing for five-year terms. The dual elections and the expansion of parliament by 50 seats are part of the changes approved by referendum last year.

Also new in this election is a change to electoral laws permitting parties to form alliances. This means smaller allied parties can bypass the minimum 10 percent threshold required for a single party to enter parliament. Five of the parties are running both individually and as part of two competing alliances.

In the "People Alliance," Erdogan's Justice and Development Party is joined by the Nationalist Movement Party. The small far-right Great Unity Party supports it.

The "Nation Alliance" consists of the secular Republican People's Party, the nascent nationalist Good Party and the small Islamic-leaning Felicity Party. Also supporting the alliance for parliament but not running individually is the small center-right Democrat Party.

The pro-Kurdish liberal Peoples' Democratic Party has been left out of the opposition alliance and will have to pass the threshold alone.

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THE CAMPAIGN

Erdogan's call for early elections caught Turkey off guard and sent the opposition scrambling to compete.

A master campaigner, Erdogan had already been rallying his base for months through state and party events, showcasing completed and planned projects while lambasting his opponents. Mainstream television channels broadcast each speech live as Erdogan's hold on the media tightens further.

Meanwhile, Ince's campaign broadcasts are sometimes cut short to accommodate Erdogan's speeches, while Aksener is rarely aired and Demirtas is incarcerated. They all rely on social media to reach voters.

Unlike recent elections, however, opposition candidates and parties are mounting a serious challenge and voters now have diverse options.

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POTENTIAL FOR CONTROVERSY

The new ballots for parliament with the puzzling alliance and individual party options are bound to create confusion. Though Turkey's electoral board released examples of ballots showing what counts as a vote for an alliance or a party, voters remain uninformed.

Changes to the electoral laws have raised fears of fraud. Civil servants will now head ballot box committees and security forces may be called to polling stations. Citing security reasons, authorities have relocated thousands of polling stations in predominantly Kurdish eastern and southeastern provinces. That will affect some 144,000 voters, forcing them to travel further to cast ballots, some through military checkpoints.

Ballot papers carrying a watermark but not the ballot box committee's official stamp will be considered valid, something that led to allegations of fraud during last year's referendum.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is monitoring the elections with 350 observers.

The vote is taking place under a state of emergency declared in the aftermath of the bloody 2016 coup. Under emergency powers, freedoms of assembly and press have been curtailed.

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A look at dual elections in Turkey testing Erdogan's power ...

ISTANBUL Public schools are closing, on little or no notice, and being replaced by religious schools. Exams are scrapped by presidential whim. Tens of thousands of public teachers have been fired. Outside religious groups are teaching in schools, without parental consent.

The battle over how to shape Turkeys next generation has become a tumultuous issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he seeks re-election on Sunday in a vote that is shaping up as a referendum on his deepening imprint on the country after 15 years at the helm.

Mr. Erdogan has already chipped away at Turkeys democratic institutions, purging the courts and civil service of suspected opponents, bringing the media to heel, and leaving in place a state of emergency after a failed coup in 2016 that has added a new level of precariousness to the campaign.

His opponents fear that his re-election to a newly empowered presidency after constitutional changes last year will give Mr. Erdogan almost unchecked authority to push his agenda even further and fundamentally alter Turkish society.

Education has become a central issue as parents around the country are protesting his changes and scrambling to find schools of their choice as standards slide and unemployment swells.

Most controversial has been Mr. Erdogans push to expand religious education, in ways that thrill his supporters and alarm his critics.

Mr. Erdogan has made no secret of his desire to recast Turkey in his own image, one rivaling the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the founder of the republic and its first president.

Their visions for Turkey could not be more different. Atatrk was a nationalist and secularist whose sensibility permeates Turkish culture. Mr. Erdogan is an Islamist who rose from the conservative, religious working class that most resented westernized secularism.

Even while prime minister, six years ago, Mr. Erdogan declared his desire to raise a pious generation.

Do you expect that a party with a conservative, democratic identity would raise an atheist youth? he said, challenging his opponents about the aims of his Justice and Development Party. You may have such an aim, but we dont.

The words revealed a cause close to Mr. Erdogans heart and those of his supporters in his conservative, rural and religious base.

For them, the drive for religious schools represents a democratization of education and the reversal of the discrimination under the secular republic.

Turkeys religious roots run deep, even if the separation of religion and state is well established. Even Mr. Erdogans main presidential challenger, Muharrem Ince, has not opposed the drive for religious schools, but rather sought to seize the issue from him.

A former physics teacher, Mr. Ince speaks proudly of his early career teaching in a religious school. He has attacked Mr. Erdogan for using the religious schools to win votes, not the schools themselves.

But he promises religious schools and courses will be optional, and vows to raise a generation of scientists and space engineers for the digital age.

The stance is clearly intended to unite an electorate that has been divided by Mr. Erdogans program, which has replaced many secular public schools with religious ones, known as Imam Hatip schools. (The name means Cleric Preacher.)

The Imam Hatip schools teach the national curriculum, but roughly half their courses are religious and their core classes those which a student has to pass to matriculate are the Quran and Arabic.

Mr. Erdogan has vastly expanded the schools, from just 450 schools 15 years ago to 4,500 nationwide today. His government increased the budget for religious education this year by 68 percent, to $1.5 billion.

As the elected head of the government, Mr. Erdogan has every right to make the changes he wants, said Batuhan Aydagul of the Initiative for Education Reform, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to improve critical thinking in the education.

Eighty-seven percent of the school population is still in nonreligious schools, he noted. This is not Pakistan, he said.

But especially among the aspiring middle class of Istanbul and other cities, parents have complained that Mr. Erdogan has aggressively pushed religious instruction in ways divisive, deceptive and damaging to educational standards.

Some parents are pulling their children from the religious schools and sending them to private ones, or settling unhappily for technical and vocational schools.

The Education Ministry has acknowledged that 69 percent of places in Imam Hatip schools remained unfilled as late as 2016. But the schools keep sprouting up.

In Besiktas, a district on the European side of Istanbul, parents have been fighting a losing, two-year battle to prevent their neighborhood school from being turned into an Imam Hatip school.

We started with a slogan Dont Touch my School, said Gunay Imir, a retired factory worker and trade unionist whose youngest son is still at the school. Then we saw the problem was much more widespread and now we have the Movement for Secular, Scientific Education.

The movement coordinates activists from 20 cities around the country, she said.

Still, the school has been partially converted into an Imam Hatip school, and religious instruction has increased.

Last year, a class of 12-year-olds were shown a film about demons that was so violent and scary that several had nightmares, parents said.

The film teaches if you renounce your faith you will have this horror, said one parent, Erdogan Delioglu. Despite parents complaints, the same film was shown to another class last month.

They are stealing the childrens future, Mr. Delioglu said.

In early May, an Islamic organization visited and gave a talk to girls from the seventh and eighth grade.

They said dont wear leggings as it will arouse mens attention, said Oya Ustundag, an accountant who has a son in the eighth grade. They said only hands, eyes and feet should be shown.

In Acibadem, a middle-class district on the Asian side of Istanbul, parents organized marches and protests at the school gates twice a week after they heard in 2013 through the schools drivers that their school would be demolished and replaced by a new Imam Hatip.

When confronted, the principal denied any changes, the parents said. The demolitions went ahead anyway.

Serife Arslan, who wanted a secular education for her son, could only find an alternative miles away.

Walk around this neighborhood now and you cannot find a single neighborhood public school, Ms. Arslan said. They are all religious schools.

For Mr. Erdogan, the drive for religious education is deeply personal. He was educated at an Imam Hatip in the district of Fatih, in Istanbul, and oversaw its $12 million renovation. He sent his daughter to the one in Acibadem.

To some extent his being a graduate of an Imam Hatip may affect him emotionally, said Halit Bekiroglu, a spokesman for the Imam Hatip Graduates Association, who said he knows the president personally.

In 2017, at the reopening of his old school, Mr. Erdogan reminisced about his time there, but also spoke with bitterness about the ignorance and discrimination he faced.

When I was a student here, there was no other Imam Hatip in Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan said, in comments reported by the newspaper Haberturk. Some of our teachers would say to us, Why did you come here? Are you going to be a washer of dead bodies?

As a budding politician, Mr. Erdogan witnessed a military coup against the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan in 1997 he was a member of his party.

The generals forced the closing of all religious middle schools and barred the majority of graduates from Imam Hatip schools from entering university.

After Mr. Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, he at first trod carefully but, opponents say, his government also began quietly transforming education in discriminatory ways.

Onur Kaya, the former head of the education ministry for Ankara, the capital, said that the principals of 2,000 public schools in his area were replaced, 90 percent of them by people educated in Imam Hatip high schools.

Many of those removed, himself included, were from the Alevi minority, which won a ruling at the European Court of Human Rights in 2016 against the Turkish government for religious discrimination.

In 15 years, they totally cleansed them from the ministry, Mr. Kaya said.

Mr. Erdogan has done much the same in a power struggle with a former Islamist ally, the United States-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, who had played a leading role in education.

After followers of Mr. Gulen made a failed coup attempt in 2016, schoolteachers 34,000 of them were purged in the crackdown that followed.

Still, supporters say they want to see Mr. Erdogans push for religious education expanded to meet demand.

On a social level, we think it is appropriate and we even consider it not enough, said Mr. Bekiroglu of the graduates association.

Fourteen percent of pupils roughly 1.4 million were studying in religious schools by 2017, he said. He would like to see the number rise to 20 percent in high schools and 30 percent in middle schools.

When asked about their schooling, graduates of Imam Hatip schools, who had gathered to break the Ramadan fast together in a 16th century madrasa, spoke enthusiastically of the quality and camaraderie.

Very beautiful, said Hilal Misirli, 21, because you study subjects others take, but also what you believe.

But many link Turkeys recent fall in international rankings it dropped in the PISA index, which evaluates critical thinking, from 44th to 49th out of 72 countries to constant disruptions and the focus on religion.

When I started 18 years ago the quality was high, said Aysel Kocak, a district leader of the Union for Laborers of Education and Science, who teaches math at a technical school in Istanbuls third district. Now I cannot teach them as intensively as I would wish.

She pointed to a working-class district of Istanbul, in Kagithane, that has two public high schools, but seven Imam Hatip schools five for girls and eight technical schools.

This illustrates what this government proposes for low income people, she said, that your son will end up as cheap labor and your daughter in an Imam Hatip.

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Erdogans Plan to Raise a Pious Generation Divides ...

ANKARA, Turkey Since he took office in 2003, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has given a name to each stage in his consolidation of power in Turkey. First he called himself the apprentice; then the journeyman; and latterly the master. Now, he says a new five-year term would elevate him to the role of "grandmaster" and help him make Turkey one of the world's top powers by the time the republic marks its centenary in 2023.

The most powerful and polarizing leader in Turkish history, Erdogan, 64, is standing for re-election in a presidential vote on Sunday that could cement Turkey's switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system, which was narrowly approved in a referendum last year. He would take an office with vastly expanded powers, in a system that critics have compared to one-man rule. His opponents have promised a return to a parliamentary system with a distinct separation of powers.

Opinion polls have put Erdogan several points ahead of his closest competitor in the presidential race. However, he would need to win more than 50 percent of the votes for an outright first-round victory and that looks less likely. Analysts say the outcome could be decided in a second round runoff on July 8.

Erdogan, who has never lost an election, is this time around facing more robust opposition figures and parties cooperating with each other in an anti-Erdogan alliance. For the first time ever, Turkey will elect a new parliament at the same time, but his Justice and Development party's election campaign has appeared a little flat and uninspired, focusing on past achievements and making odd campaign promises such as the creation of neighborhood "reading houses" offering free tea and cakes. Analysts even speak of the possibility of Justice and Development losing its majority in Parliament.

"(Erdogan) remains by far the most popular politician in Turkey," said Sinan Ulgen of the Istanbul-based EDAM think tank. "He is still the one that is the most likely to be elected, but it is not a foregone conclusion."

Erdogan called the presidential and parliamentary elections more than a year earlier than scheduled amid signs that the Turkish economy may be heading toward a downturn. Despite strong growth figures, inflation and unemployment have hit double-digit figures while the lira has lost some 20 percent of its value against the dollar since the start of the year.

Additionally, the polls are being held as nationalist sentiment is high following a Turkish military operation into a Syrian border enclave earlier this year that drove away Syrian Kurdish fighters that Turkey brands as terrorists. Turkey has recently intensified air raids on a suspected Kurdish rebel stronghold in northern Iraq, a move that could further rally votes for Erdogan.

The most powerful leader since the Turkish republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Erdogan remains popular in Turkey's conservative and pious heartland. Many see in him a strong leader who stands up to West, who brought stability, oversaw an infrastructure boom, who improved health care and relaxed strict secular laws, for instance allowing women to wear Islamic headscarves in schools and government offices.

His critics say Erdogan, in pursuit of power, is turning the NATO country that once hoped to join the European Union into an increasingly authoritarian state. They accuse him of curtailing democracy and freedom of speech, of jailing opponents, including students, journalists and activists, especially following a failed military coup in 2016. A state of emergency declared after the coup attempt has led to the arrests of some 50,000 and seen more than 110,000 dismissed from government jobs.

"Erdogan is the man to deliver," Erdogan's adviser Ilnur Cevik told The Associated Press in an interview, countering accusations that Erdogan is in pursuit of greater powers.

"Erdogan does not have absolute power he has the affection of the people..."

The allied opposition which includes the center-left and pro-secular Republican Peoples' Party, the center-right Good Party and the small Islamic Felicity Party has vowed to roll back Erdogan's presidential system and to improve relations with allies and the European Union. Also challenging Erdogan is the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, whose charismatic leader is running for president from jail.

Erdogan's AKP has formed an alliance with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party. Already in control of a majority of Turkey's media, Erdogan's government has changed electoral rules, raising fears that the elections may not be fair. The changes allow government officials to control ballot stations, for ballot stations to be moved to new locations on security grounds and for ballot papers lacking an official stamp to be counted as valid.

Ismail Buyukcakar, who played soccer alongside Erdogan in the early 1970s in Istanbul's Camialti team, recalls a young man who had leadership qualities and oozed confidence.

"He is a good fortune for Turkey. We need to take advantage of this good fortune," Buyukcakar said. "In my opinion, Turkey needs our president for another 20 years."

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Associated Press reporters Ayse Wieting and Mehmet Guzel contributed from Istanbul.

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Turkey's Erdogan seeks new term with greater powers | Fox News

In 15 years of Recep Tayyip Erdogan governments, Turkish markets have mostly relished the last month leading up to elections. This time, its different.

Ever since 2002, when the Turkish presidents Ak Party first came to power, at least one asset class -- be it the lira or stocks -- has rallied in the run-up to impending votes. In the month leading up to snap elections on June 24, the lira has depreciated 3.6 percent against the dollar, despite the central banks emergency efforts to help stem the currencys decline.

The Borsa Istanbul 100 Index has dropped about 7 percent even as valuations tumbled to nine-year lows, and the yield on 10-year bonds has surged more than 160 basis points.

Turkish markets show their worst pre-election performances of Ak Party era

Irrespective of what the political outcome is this weekend, the economic outlook in Turkey cannot be favorable in any scenario, Julian Rimmer, a London-based trader at Investec Bank Plc, said by email. Turkey is faced with a Hobsons Choice of either the continuation of destructively unsustainable Erdonomics or a new government and/or president obliged to take some bitter corrective medicine with much lower growth.

Emerging market inflows and accommodative monetary policies globally, which gave Turkey a free pass throughout the last cycle, are no longer operative, Rimmer said.

Part of the reason Turkish assets typically gained ahead of elections in the past can be attributed to pre-ballot polls showing the Ak poised for landslide victories, with the party and Erdogan depicted as bastions of stability for the economy and markets.

On this occasion, investors would like to see progress on economic reforms before making strategic investment decisions, said Piotr Matys, an emerging market strategist at Rabobank in London. The role of the central bank after the vote will be absolutely crucial.

A little over a month before the elections, Erdogan said he intended to tighten his grip on monetary policy, comments that sent the lira into a downward spiral, tumbling to a record-low against the dollar. He doubled down this week by urging his supporters to give him another five-year term in Sundays election so he can lower interest rates.

The ballot takes place amid heightening investor fears of an economic slowdown. While Turkeys economy grew 7.4 percent last year and in the first quarter of this year, the expansion came at the expense of one of the widest current-account deficits among G-20 nations and a double-digit inflation rate.

In May, S&P Global Ratings cut Turkeys credit rating deeper into junk saying there is a risk of a hard landing for Turkeys overheating, credit-fueled economy. In June, Moodys said the nations rating could be cut due to the uncertainty regarding the direction of countrys macroeconomic policy and said recent erosion in investor confidence will continue if not addressed through policy actions following the vote.

Assuming Erdogan is re-elected, hell be governing for at least another five years; so, perhaps during the first half of his presidency, hell have less incentive to keep stimulating the economy as hes been doing for the last two years, Matys said. If thats the case, the economy may rebalance and inflation may fall, which would be an encouraging signal for investors. But there are still massive question marks.

With assistance by Inci Ozbek, and Paul Wallace

(Updates asset prices throughout.)

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In Erdogan's Turkey, Markets Haven't Been So Bad Before ...

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkeys Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has spent the last few weeks talking himself out of a job.

Presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday will trigger the switch to a powerful executive presidency and the abolition of the post of prime minister, unseating Yildirim two years after his promotion by President Tayyip Erdogan.

The presidents staunch ally, 62, shrugged off the prospect of stepping down as he flew across Turkey on a schedule of daily election rallies, adopting a philosophical stance.

These titles are meaningful for a certain period of time. After that, you are an ordinary person and life goes on. You will only live whatever is in your destiny, he told Reuters on board a flight to a rally in southeast Turkey.

His destiny has been entwined with Erdogan since the 1990s when Yildirim, educated in shipbuilding and marine sciences, was in charge of a high-speed ferry company in Istanbul at a time when Erdogan was mayor of Turkeys largest city.

Yildirim, from Erzincan in eastern Turkey, was a founding member of Erdogans ruling AK Party and took the mantle of prime minister in May 2016, replacing Ahmet Davutoglu who stepped down following weeks of public tension with Erdogan.

Since then, much of his work has focused on paving the way for the constitutional transition to a presidential system, narrowly approved in a referendum last year - a task which Yildirim described as his most important accomplishment.

Now that I have kept my promise, I am at peace, he said.

If elected as widely expected, Erdogan will return to the presidency with new sweeping executive powers, able to form a cabinet, dissolve parliament and declare a state of emergency.

The elections had been scheduled for November 2019 but Erdogan brought them forward to June 24, saying the switch was needed to tackle economic and security challenges rapidly. It was a decision that Yildirim loyally supported.

Elected as a deputy for Istanbul in 2002 when the AKP won its first election, Yildirim then served as transport minister for more than a decade, presiding over major infrastructure projects widely viewed as key to the AKPs electoral successes.

As prime minister Yildirim has often adopted a folksy style in his speeches, at times glum, at times injecting humor as he reaches out to voters. Surrounded by loyal AK Party supporters on the latest campaign trail, he has been filmed baking traditional Turkish pide bread and serving customers at an ice-cream stall.

Yildirim looks set to remain in politics. He is running in Sundays parliamentary election as an AKP candidate in the western coastal province of Izmir, where he campaigned unsuccessfully to be mayor in 2014.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, Yildirims close relationship with Erdogan looks set to continue.

We will continue to work together no matter what our titles are, Yildirim said.

Writing by Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Daren Butler and Peter Graff

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Erdogan loyalist Yildirim: happy to become Turkey's last ...