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votes while Yildirim received 4,131,761. The results of 84 of a total of 31,186 ballot boxes were yet to be uploaded to the system, according to Guven.
Around 13:00 local time, Imamoglu told reporters that he had attracted 4,168,546 votes compared to Yildirim’s 4,142,791. Only 16 ballot boxes were at that stage left to be counted according to the CHP’s vote counting records based on signed proceedings gathered by its ballot representatives.
Around 14:00, Yildirim told reporters that a total of 319,500 invalid ballot papers had been identified and that legal processes would continue.
Websites freeze. The YSK’s website has not been accessible since late at night on April 1 while Anadolu’s election website stopped its live reporting of the local election results when it declared 98% of ballot boxes had been counted. During the last elections in Turkey—the snap parliamentary and presidential polls held on June 24, 2018—the opposition’s alternative website, launched to counter claimed manipulations seen in Anadolu’s vote reporting, also froze on election night. When asked on April 1 about the Anadolu freeze, Guven said the news service was not his customer.
During the Erdogan era, Anadolu’s early results during vote counting in all past elections have always indicated a landslide victory was ahead for the AKP.
Although it was rather repeating what anyone closely watching Turkey knows full well by now, after election day was over a delegation of the Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities voiced concerns over freedom of speech conditions in the country, not only for journalists but also for regular citizens, undermining the possibility of holding free and fair elections, Reuters reported. Around 95% of Turkey’s media is heavily pro-Erdogan.
With 100% of votes counted nationwide, Anadolu presented official results showing that the People’s Alliance formed by the AKP and the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)) took 51.62% of the vote . In some places, the AKP and MHP agreed to put up just one candidate, while the CHP-led Nation Alliance did the same and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) opted not to put up candidates, deciding instead to stick to its southeastern heartlands. That meant the party vote totals will have been skewed, but the only percentage that counts in the final analysis is the one that shows the People's Alliance somehow once again managed to stay above the 50% threshold—despite the sheer misery visited on so many of the 81-mn-strong population by recession, roaring inflation, joblessness, a severely degraded currency, unpayable debts and privations such as shortages of medicines.
Kurds vote tactically. In southeastern Sirnak province, a predominantly Kurdish province which is under an unofficial curfew, the AKP’s vote skyrocketed compared to past elections. However, results for provinces in the west of the country and for cities where the HDP opted not to put up candidates, suggested Kurds collectively tactically voted for Nation Alliance candidates. Selahattin Demirtas, the imprisoned former co-head of the HDP, had urged them in a letter from his prison cell a few days before the polls to vote in that way despite sometimes disturbing nationalist rhetoric heard from some Nation Alliance representatives.
President left waiting for phone to ring? Erdogan, who in the past has enjoyed affirmative support from foreign allies after controversial results recorded in previous elections and the 2017 constitutional referendum that paved the way for his executive presidency, seemed to be left waiting for the phone to ring this time around. Julian Rimmer of Investec stressed that despite Erdogan media going for "World leaders congratulate Erdogan" headlines, only the Bosnian, Albanian, Pakistani, Azerbaijani, Serbian and Guinean leaders had called the Turkish president. Kerim Has, a Moscow-based political analyst,
14 TURKEY Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com