Polls indicate that Erdoğan will win in first round of presidential election

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needs to garner the votes of nearly 23 million Turkish citizens, which corresponds to 51 percent of voters, to be elected as the president in the first round of the election.

Following the announcement of all candidates to run for the presidency, research institutions expedite their studies to take the pulse of the nation.

The latest poll conducted by Pollmark predicted that AK Party candidate Erdoğan would receive 51.4 percent of votes while Republican People's Party (CHP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) joint candidate Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu would lag behind with 39.4 percent. Pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) candidate Selahattin Demirtaş would only receive 7.2 percent of the votes, the poll said. Pollmark's poll indicated that Erdoğan might take the presidential seat in the first round of the election.

GENAR released a public survey regarding the presidential election. The survey predicts that Erdoğan would win 55.2 percent of the vote as Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu will stay on 35.8 percent.

According to the pro-CHP pollster SONAR, Erdoğan would defeat the opposition CHP and MHP joint candidate Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu. Among 2,800 surveyed people who live in 26 different cities, 46 percent say that they will vote for Erdoğan. The numbers of those who said that they will vote for the opposition's joint candidate İhsanoğlu is around 35.3 percent. 6.2 percent of those surveyed stated that they will vote for the HDP. The survey says that the votes of those who remain undecided will split among the candidates, which will increase Erdoğan's votes to 52.6 percent while İhsanoğlu will receive 40.3 percent.

A survey conducted by Ankara-based Objective Research Center (ORC) indicated that 54 percent of the people surveyed will vote for Erdoğan and 39.4 percent of them will vote for İhsanoğlu while 6.6 percent say that they will vote for HDP's candidate.