Opposition demands mandate as Istanbul recount continues
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey’s main opposition candidate in Istanbul urged the High Election Board on Wednesday to confirm him as the elected mayor, after it ruled in favor of a partial recount of votes in eight of the city’s 39 districts.
Initial results from Sunday’s mayoral elections showed the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) had narrowly won control of Turkey’s two biggest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, in a shock upset for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party.
If those results are confirmed in the coming days, the CHP will gain control of municipal budgets with an estimated total value of 32.6 billion liras ($5.79b.) for 2019 in Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial hub, and in the capital, Ankara.
Erdogan – who campaigned hard for the AKP ahead of the vote – would likely lose some oversight for local contracts in the two cities, possibly complicating his efforts to drag the Turkish economy out of recession.
However, the AKP submitted objections to election results in all districts of Istanbul and Ankara, saying the results had been impacted by invalid votes and voting irregularities.
In Istanbul, CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu and his AKP rival, ex-prime minister Binali Yildirim, both said on Monday that Imamoglu was about 25,000 votes ahead, a relatively slim margin in a city of some 15 million people.
The chairman of the Election Board (YSK), Sadi Guven, said on Wednesday it had ruled that the recount of what had been marked as invalid votes should go ahead in eight Istanbul districts, some of them AKP strongholds.
Imamoglu called on the YSK to “do its job” and name him mayor, accusing the AKP of disrespecting the people of Istanbul.
“We want justice. We demand our mandate from the YSK, which has given the numbers, as the elected mayor of this city .... The world is watching us, the world is watching this city’s elections,” he told reporters.
“Three or four people acting like children who had their toys taken away should not damage this country’s reputation through their own internal fights.”
AKP deputy chairman Ali Ihsan Yavuz said his party was not doing anything illegal and added that the vote difference between Imamoglu and Yildirim had fallen to below 20,000 votes.
“We believe the reality will emerge tonight, and we will all accept the results. Both Ekrem Imamoglu and the AK Party will have to accept the outcome,” Yavuz told reporters.
Pro-government newspapers on Wednesday said there had been a conspiracy against Turkey in the local elections, with the Star newspaper likening this to an attempted military coup in 2016 and nationwide protests in 2013.
Yeni Safak newspaper editor Ibrahim Karagul called for a second vote, after what he termed a “coup via elections,” adding without providing evidence that supporters of the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen – blamed by Ankara for the 2016 coup attempt – were involved.
Ahead of the elections, the CHP had formed an electoral alliance with the Iyi (Good) Party to rival that of the AKP and its nationalist MHP partner. In Ankara, opposition candidate Mansur Yavas received 50.9% of votes on Sunday, nearly 4 percentage points ahead of his AKP rival.
In some 100 rallies during his election campaign, Erdogan had described the opposition alliance as terrorist supporters linked to Gulen’s network and Kurdish militants.