After the ruling AKP lost the mayoralty in the Turkish capital, Ankara, in Sunday's vote, the race for the mayor’s seat in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, seemed to tip toward the main opposition candidate Monday morning, in what would be the biggest electoral setback in the history of the AKP.
Throughout Sunday night, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported data showing the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, trailing the AKP's Binali Yıldırım by a wide gap. Shortly before midnight, Yıldırım declared victory. Soon after, massive AKP posters appeared across Istanbul.
AKP thanks Istanbul
“Posters are unveiled across Istanbul thanking the people of the city for electing the AK Party candidate, but no result has been declared yet," tweeted Michael Sercan Daventry, a British-Turkish journalist who writes at JamesinTurkey.com. "If this were the West, they’d be lampooned for being so presumptuous.”
Shortly before midnight, Anadolu Agency stopped reporting results from Istanbul. "The results for elections in İstanbul not updated for more than 9 hours," tweeted Özgür Ünlühisarcıklı, Ankara office director for the German-Marshall Fund.
İmamoğlu repeatedly rejected the validity of Anadolu’s count, saying his party had been tracking data sent by Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) that placed him in the lead.
At 7:44 a.m. in Turkey (GMT +2), the BBC's Turkish language site showed İmamoğlu with 27,000 votes more than his opponent, at 48.80 percent of the vote to Yıldırım’s 48.48 percent. Soon after, pro-government news site DHA reported that İmamoğlu was ahead in Istanbul and the YSK confirmed İmamoğlu's lead.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had described the vote as a “matter of survival” for Turkey, and Islamic parties linked to the president had controlled the Istanbul and Ankara mayoral seats for 25 years. His AKP won overall, taking nearly 52 percent of the total vote. Yet the results showed a clear decline in AKP support in Turkey's largest cities, which drive the economy. The AKP lost the Ankara mayoralty to the CHP on Sunday evening, while other CHP victories may have handed the opposition party control of nearly two-thirds of Turkey's economy. Istanbul, for example, represents nearly a third of Turkey's GDP.
Opponents of the president seemed to take the results as a victory. In Fındıklı, a district in Erdoğan's home city of Rize, in Turkey's Black Sea region, voters poured into the streets and chanted "Welcome Democracy" after the results showed a CHP victory.
"Never in my adult life have I seen Turkey’s opposition — fragmented, bitter and colossally self-obsessed — put on an election show of the kind I watched last night, especially in Istanbul and Ankara," Daventry tweeted early Monday, citing the party's resilience, solidarity and strategy. "A new dawn has not broken for Turkey this morning — but, to labour the metaphor, we may have seen the first lights."
The Turkish president gave a balcony speech in Ankara early on Monday morning that appeared to contradict Yıldırım's declaration of victory. “Please do not be heartbroken with this result,” Erdoğan said. “We will see how they are going to administer.”
As of 10 a.m. Monday morning, the AKP had yet to concede the race for Istanbul mayor, while many other results remained uncertified. Anadolu Agency reported that nearly 1,400,000 votes across the country could be invalidated.