A portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is fixed next to Turkish flags at a polling station set up in the Grugahalle hall in Essen, western Germany, on May 23, 2023, ahead of Turkey's first run-off election to take place on May 28, 2023. 500,000 Turkish voters living in the western German federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia are called to cast their ballots for the second round of voting. Turkey's biggest election of its post-Ottoman era confounded pollsters and threw up surprises that underscored the difficulty of gauging the mood of the sharply polarised country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came within a fraction of a percentage point of defeating secular challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the first round that took place on May 14, 2023. Neither one's ability to break the 50-percent threshold sets up a historic May 28 runoff -- Turkey's first -- that Erdogan enters as the strong favourite. (Photo by Ina FASSBENDER / AFP)