Although no rules were violated, the election in Turkey was not fair because of the media restrictions that were targeting the opposition, analyst and journalist Orhan Hadzagic told N1 on Monday.

Nearly all votes in the country’s early election on July 24 have been counted, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the long-standing leader, is likely to be re-elected as president.

The results of last year’s referendum will give him new sweeping powers, as the post of the prime minister is now abolished.

Erdogan is now leading with 53 percent but the final results of the election are to be announced on Friday.

Turkey has shown that it matured in regard to its cultural and technical understanding of the election process, Hadzagic said, as 87.5 percent of those eligible have voted.

“Turkey is an interesting region, it is not the Caucasus, the Middle East or Central Asia (…) People are emotional, the elections concern their homeland and they act according to emotion,” the analyst said.

“Considering its fairness, Turkey is becoming one of the most progressive democracies in the world, when looking at how successfully they are conducting such an operation,” he said.

There were no complaints from opposition parties in regard to how the election was conducted, he said, but added that citizens were not informed about the candidates to an equal extent.

“The election was conducted according to rules, but it was not fair. It comes down to the dominance of the AK party and Erdogan, the ironclad leader of the party and the bigger part of the state,” he said.

“The election was not fair due to the fact that there was a media blockade of opposition parties. Some 50 percent of the electoral base of the AK party does not use the internet. That speaks about how much this base was informed about the alternatives,” he said.

Hadzagic said that Turkey’s Government and Parliament will now face a hard task.

“The economy is not doing that great, they need new investments, they need to bring back those who left the country. They also have a staffing shortage, a lot of good potential staff has left,” he said.

Although Erdogan has a key partner in the Government, the leader of a right-wing political party with whom he can form a parliamentary majority, he will not be able to make decisions on his own, Hadzagic said.

In a Deutsche Welle analysis, Erdogan was labeled a “cold-blooded autocrat”. Hadzagic said he agrees that the Turkish leader is an autocrat, but said that he is also pragmatic.