Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has changed his party’s campaign team for the rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election on June 23 to try to reach voters who were undecided or did not to vote the first time round, Hürriyet newspaper said on Thursday.
The secular main opposition’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won the vote for mayor of Turkey’s biggest city on March 31, but was stripped of his mayoral mandate and the advisers he appointed were dismissed after the Supreme Election Council (YSK) on Monday upheld an appeal by Erdoğan’s ruling Islamist party alleging irregularities in the ballot.
İmamoğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) appealed for the annulment of all the March 31 elections in Istanbul, including those for district mayors and city councillors, arguing that as the votes were held side-by-side, if one ballot was invalid, they all were.
Meanwhile Erdoğan gathered senior officials of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Wednesday to come up with a new election strategy. Ali İhsan Yavuz, the deputy chairman of the AKP who led the appeal against the Istanbul result, will head the campaign, Hürriyet said.
The newspaper said the ruling party discussed the results of a survey conducted in Istanbul in the aftermath of the elections. The survey showed 70 percent of those who were undecided or did not to vote on March 31 were AKP supporters.
The ruling party will target those 1.7 million voters with a face-to-face campaign, using softer arguments, Hürriyet said. Following the March 31 vote, many commentators, including some AKP members, said Erdoğan’s attempts to brand the opposition as being in league with terrorists had cost the party votes.
Like his ally Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Erdoğan also decided to move his headquarters to Istanbul until June 23 and actively join the campaign.
Erdoğan also asked senior officials to inform people of the reasons why the Istanbul vote was annulled, Hürriyet said. AKP-affiliated social media accounts on Wednesday started posting information on what they called electoral fraud in Istanbul.
According to posts by the AKP’s youth branch, unsealed ballot papers were among the reasons for the annulment. The YSK rejected opposition appeals and decided to accept unsealed ballot papers in a 2017 constitutional referendum that gave Erdoğan executive presidential powers. CHP sources said after the referendum that around 1.5 million unsealed ballot papers were accepted across Turkey, while according to the AKP youth branch, the number of unsealed ballots in Istanbul’s March 31 elections was 5,388.
Opposition parties have also started work on an election campaign in Istanbul. İmamoğlu told the Times newspaper that he would tour every district of the city before June 23, adding that some 80,000 new election monitoring volunteers had signed up since the YSK’s decision.
Leftist BirGun reported that Erdogan will visit all of 39 districts of Istanbul to hold rallies ahead of June 23 rerun elections.