Erdogan suffered his first serious election defeat
On Wednesday, April 17, Turkey's Supreme Electoral Commission recognized the victory of Ekrem Imamoglu, the candidate from the country's main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), in the Istanbul mayoral elections, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
This was reported by the Turkish Anadolu agency. The elections took place on March 31, but it took almost three weeks for the results to be finalized.
A day earlier, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party appealed to the country’s election commission with a request to annul the election results in the city. According to media reports, party representatives delivered “three suitcases of evidence” of violations in the last vote to the CEC. The Nationalist Movement Party (MNP), the AK Party's partner in the ruling coalition, also asked the CEC to hold repeat elections.
The ruling party chose one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest associates, Binali Yildirim, as a candidate for the election of mayor of the country’s largest city (population 17 million). Until February of this year, he was the chairman of the Turkish parliament, and from May 2016 to July 2018, he served as head of government. His main rival was Imamoglu, the leader of the Republican Party (the oldest in the republic, founded by Kemal Ataturk).
The rivals were separated by several thousand votes. Immediately after the elections, the election commission announced that Imamoglu beat Yildirim by a margin of 28 thousand votes, which in percentage terms was less than 0,3%. A week after the vote, the AKP began to demand a review of the voting results. On April 7, the ruling party sent a request to the country's election commission for a recount of votes in 38 electoral districts in Istanbul. As a result, after a recount, the gap was reduced to 14 thousand votes in favor of Imamoglu. After this, Erdogan’s party began to demand the cancellation of the election results in Istanbul, but did not achieve this.
Local government elections were held on March 31 not only in Istanbul, but throughout Turkey. According to the voting results, Erdogan's ruling AKP lost the mayoral elections in the country's two most populous, politically and economically significant cities - Istanbul and Ankara.
Erdogan suffers first major election defeat