Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) faced a major upset yesterday after local election results showed the ruling party had lost the capital, Ankara, and the nation’s economic hub, Istanbul, after a decade and half in power.
Losing the nation’s two major cities would be a stunning defeat for Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor, whose ability to win repeatedly at the ballot box has been unparalleled in Turkish history.
Erdogan campaigned hard, portraying Sunday’s vote for mayors and district councils as a fight for the nation’s survival, but the election became a test of AKP rule after Turkey slipped into a recession for the first time in a decade.
Photo: AFP
The opposition candidate for Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, was leading by nearly 28,000 votes with most ballot boxes counted, Supreme Election Board (YSK) Chairman Sadi Guven said.
Imamoglu won almost 4.16 million votes, while the AKP candidate, former prime minister Binali Yildirim, garnered 4.13 million.
Both had claimed victory in the early hours following a tightly contested race for the nation’s largest city, with preliminary results showing them in a dead heat.
Procedures to challenge the vote were continuing, Guven said, with 84 ballot boxes left to be counted.
In Ankara, the opposition candidate for mayor, Mansur Yavas, was ahead with 50.89 percent of votes against the AKP’s Mehmet Ozhaseki with 47.06 percent, Anadolu state agency reported, with 99 percent of ballot boxes counted.
“Ankara has won. The loser in Ankara is Ozhaseki, dirty politics has lost. Democracy has won,” Yavas told supporters who were waving red Turkish flags and setting off fireworks at a celebratory rally.
AKP officials had said they would object to what they claimed were tens of thousands of invalidated votes in both of the major cities.
Speaking to supporters in Ankara, Erdogan said the election was a victory for the AKP, which along with its coalition partner, the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party, won more than 50 percent of votes nationwide.
However, the Turkish leader appeared to accept some municipal posts were lost, without referring directly to the results in Ankara or Istanbul.
“If there are any shortcomings, it is our duty to correct them,” Erdogan said. “Starting tomorrow morning, we will begin our work to identify our shortcomings and make up for them.”
Analysts said the loss in Istanbul would be especially sensitive for Erdogan, who grew up in city’s working-class Kasimpasa neighborhood and liked to tell AKP rank-and-file that victory in the city was like winning Turkey.
He fielded one of his loyalists, Yildirim as the candidate, and he often campaigned more than once a day around Istanbul’s districts.
“Istanbul is his heart, it’s really important for him, it is the first place they [AKP] started winning,” said Ayse Ayata, professor of political science at Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
“There are two kinds of results of the elections. They have retained their 51 percent majority in total, which is very important. Had they not, this would lead into a questioning of their legitimacy,” Ayata said.
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