Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Aura Ugunbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

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First up, though.

On Sunday, Turkey will go to the polls in what's probably the most important election in the world this year.

The country is at a geographic crossroads between Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and at a kind of ideological one, a NATO member that's cozy with China and Russia.

At its head for more than two decades, his president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose initially sensible rule has in recent years turned increasingly autocratic.

Mr. Erdogan has been leaning on the central bank for years, enforcing some upside down economics.

These days, Turks have a currency that's slipping as fast as costs of living are soaring.

Now, for the first time in a very long time, Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development or AK Party have a plausible challenger, a mild-mannered bureaucratic opposition leader who just might put Turkey's democracy and its economy back on track.

Today, the election is on my fetch.

The order of the left is our Turkey correspondent.

Polsters give Mr. Erdogan and his rival, Kemal Kidditch, that'll roughly a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency.

The parliament also seems to be up for grabs.

Where Mr. Erdogan to lose, it would be a stunning political reversal with global consequences. But he is not going easy.

And so what has Mr. Erdogan been doing to win support in the run-up to this vote?

This had been a relatively somber campaign, largely because of the impact of the earthquakes that killed 50,000 people in southern Turkey in February.

This has changed over the past two weeks in the final stretch of the campaign, where especially Mr. Erdogan, but also his coalition partners, have deployed increasingly inflammatory rhetoric.

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