Millions of Istanbul residents began voting Sunday following a mayoral election that became a referendum on President Tayyip Erdogan’s policy and a test of Turkey’s troubled democracy.
In the initial vote on March 31, the opposition candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) won a tight victory against Erdogan’s AKP party in Turkey’s largest city, a rare election defeat for the country’s president. growing economic difficulties.
After several weeks of AKP appeal, the Turkish High Electoral Commission canceled the vote in May citing irregularities. The opposition described the decision as a “coup d’état” against democracy, which raised the issue of the second round.
Istanbul’s polling stations opened at 08:00 (05:00 GMT), with 10.56 million voters registered in a city that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the 82 million Turkish population. The vote closes at 17:00 The results will be announced in the evening.
Erdogan repeated his sentence: “Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey.” A second defeat in the city, where he was mayor in the 1990s, would be embarrassing for Erdogan and could weaken what appeared to be his iron power.
The Turkish economy is in recession and the United States, its NATO ally, has threatened to impose sanctions if Erdogan followed up plans to install Russian missile defenses.
A second defeat of the AKP could also shed more light on what CHP mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu said was the unexpended expenditure of billions of liras in the Istanbul municipality, with a budget of around $ 4 billion.
“If Imamoglu wins again, there will be a series of profound changes in Turkish politics,” said journalist and writer Murat Yetkin.
“This will be interpreted as the beginning of a decline for AKP and for Erdogan too,” he said, noting that the president himself described the local elections as “a matter of survival”.
Another Imamoglu victory could eventually trigger national elections earlier than 2023, a cabinet reshuffle and even a possible foreign policy adjustment, Yetkin added.
To narrow the gap by about 13,000 votes in March, the AKP has recently reorganized its message to Kurdish voters, who represent about 15 percent of voters in the city, out of 15 million.
The campaign suffered a reversal when imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan urged the pro-Kurdish Democratic People’s Party (HDP) to remain neutral in the vote. The HDP, which supports Imamoglu, accused Erdogan of trying to divide the Kurds.
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