Election rallies cancelled after Erdogan fell ill on live tv

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stopped running for office because he got sick during a live TV talk and the show had to be cut short.

After a 20-minute break, he came back to say he had “serious stomach flu” from two days of hard work.

Mr. Erdogan, who is 69 years old, is running for office for the first time.

Six political parties have picked Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main leader of the opposition, to run for office.

He was one of many people in the resistance who wished the president a quick recovery.

Latest polls suggest a close race between the two men and give Mr Kilicdaroglu a good chance of winning in elections on 14 May, with a possible presidential run-off two weeks afterwards.

At first, President Erdogan scrapped three events in central Anatolia on Wednesday, saying that doctors told him to stay home.

He then cancelled everything he had planned for Thursday, including the opening of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant at Akkuyu on the Mediterranean coast.

It took a long time to build Akkuyu’s four nuclear reactors, which are mostly owned by the Russian company Rosatom. Their opening was planned to meet with the election.

Instead, both Mr. Erdogan and Vladimir Putin of Russia will watch the event online.

Several journalists were sitting around President Erdogan when he fell ill during the live broadcast on Tuesday evening on pro-government channels Ulke TV and Kanal 7.

After one of the interviewers asked a question, the camera showed the writer looking more and more worried until the screen went black.

Eventually, Mr. Erdogan came back and said that he had thought about cancelling the show earlier. “Of course, we sometimes run into situations like that at work, which is so busy.”

Within hours of the show, some social media accounts outside of Turkey began to talk about how Mr. Erdogan might have had a heart attack.

Fahrettin Altun, who is in charge of Mr. Erdogan’s communications, went on social media to “categorically reject” the false claims about the president’s health. He did this by sharing screen shots of the accounts making the claims.