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2.2 Erdogan’s nemesis declared mayor of Istanbul but battle for city not over
Whatever final Istanbul result officials come up with, the opposition's candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, a former mayor of the city’s Beylikduzu district (seen, left, meeting Erdogan) and a newcomer to Turkey's big-stage politics, has written a must-read chapter on "How to deal with authoritarians".
Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition candidate who scored the biggest triumph in the end-of-March local elections that became an unofficial referendum on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was declared mayor of Istanbul on April 17. He was awarded the formal mandate even though a decision is still awaited from the High Election Board (YSK) on whether to accept a formal appeal from Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to re-run the vote in the country’s largest city.
The markets will hope the YSK turns down the request and that Erdogan and the AKP take the defeat on the chin as a democratic expression of disapproval from voters mired in Turkey’s first recession in a decade, triggered after the country’s foreign debt-fuelled economy crashed into a currency crisis last summer. Investors would like to see the government focus on fixing the economy, but the AKP, and related Islamist predecessor parties, ruled the business and cultural capital for 25 years; they won’t give it up easily—and anyway, the rules require that in order for the AKP to pursue its “extraordinary objection” to the validity of Imamoglu’s victory, the mandate for the mayorship first needs to be granted to him.
The loss of Istanbul—despite fierce campaigning on the stump by Erdogan in the build-up to the municipal polls, which saw him attend up to half a dozen rallies per day and warn his audiences that Turkey’s “survival” was at stake—is keenly felt because the now executive president rose to prominence in Turkish politics as mayor of Istanbul in 1994.
Victory margin whittled down to 13,000 votes. Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Imamoglu was helped to victory by the fact that other substantial opposition parties agreed not to put up candidates in the contest for the city of 16mn. In the immediate wake of the vote, his margin of victory was
9 TURKEY Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com