Page 13 - TURKRptMay19

Turkish poll results delayed with Erdogan’s air of invincibility on the line.
With the air of invincibility surrounding Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatening to dissolve after his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) apparent loss of both Ankara and Istanbul as well as other major cities in the March 31 local elections, officials announced that they had pushed back the release of the official results of the polls until next week. The move came after the AKP said it had decided to lodge objections in the neck-and-neck mayoral race for Istanbul.
Mired in economic turmoil. The executive president, battered by a currency crisis and recession that have left many of his usual voters mired in economic turmoil, stumped fiercely in the election campaign, holding half a dozen rallies a day and delivering polarising rhetoric, including claims that various opposition figures had relations with “terrorists”. He essentially embraced the idea that the elections had become a referendum on him and if both Ankara and Istanbul slip from his grasp—even despite the media coverage in Turkey hugely skewed in his favour—he’ll be widely seen as having lost that referendum.
In Ankara, CHP candidate Mansur Yavas is predicted to have secured 50.9% of the vote, leaving the AKP candidate clearly behind on 47.1%. Just as with the Istanbul result, the AKP is registering an appeal.
As the live election results for Istanbul came in on March 31 and turned narrowly in favour of the CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, the official reporting of the numbers suddenly froze with no explanation.
Definite “slap around the chops”. Even if the results for Turkey’s two most important cities are eventually declared in favour of the AKP, Erdogan will know full well he has been given “a slap around the chops” as analyst Julian Rimmer of Investec put it in a note to investors.
Turks may start to believe Erdogan’s beatable. As claims and counter-claims flew over alleged irregularities in the Istanbul and Ankara voting and vote-counting, Turks were mainly focused on Istanbul, the business capital of the country where Erdogan rose to prominence after becoming mayor of the city in 1994. Erdogan’s AKP, which has never lost an election since coming to power in 2002, has always maintained control of both Ankara and Istanbul and if the main opposition party, the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), can bag the mayorships of both the former and the latter then the one half of Turks who detest their strongman president may start to believe he is truly beatable.
Given the risks in allowing such a perception to spread, it is still not clear whether Erdogan will accept an official narrow win for the CHP in Istanbul, while the AKP has claimed that there were “very clear” mistakes at thousands of ballot boxes in Ankara. The party’s candidate in the political capital, Mehmet Ozhaseki, said the reason the AKP would launch appeals against the results in Ankara was the need to uphold justice. It was not a case of a “we must win” mentality, he claimed.
With 100% of cast Istanbul ballots officially declared as counted, state-run news agency Anadolu showed CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu with 48.79% of the vote versus the 48.51% won by AKP candidate and prime minister until last year Binali Yildirim (the position of PM was abolished when Erdogan became the near-all-powerful executive president under constitutional changes).
As of around midday on April 1, Sadi Guven, head of the controversial High Election Commission YSK (so powerful now that even the supreme court cannot overturn its decisions), told reporters that Imamoglu took 4,159,650
13 TURKEY Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com