Turkey Local Election Results 2019: Erdogan's AKP faces defeat in three biggest cities

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Turkey Local Election Results 2019: Erdogan's AKP faces defeat in three biggest cities

AKP faces defeat in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir besides other cities

Monday April 1, 2019 10:06 AM, ummid.com News Network

[Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for Istanbul mayorship Ekrem Imamoglu (R) and his spouse Dilek Imamoglu (L) cast their ballots at a polling station during local elections in Istanbul, Turkey on March 31, 2019 (Photo: Muhammed Enes Yıldırım/Anadolu Agency)]

Ankara: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has almost lost the local election in Ankara and the big prize — Istanbul — was a dead heat as vote counting neared its conclusion in Turkey’s local elections on Sunday.

Turkey’s main opposition party chairman said his party’s candidates had won in all three of the country’s biggest cities. Republican People’s Party (CHP) chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu said CHP candidates had won in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir along with other cities, Arab News reported.

“We have to accept the fact that we have won and lost some cities, this is a necessity in democracies,” Erdogan said in Istanbul, pledging that Turkey would now focus on its troubled economy in the run up to national elections in 2023.

“We have a long period ahead where we will carry out economic reforms without compromising on the rules of the free market economy,” he told reporters.

On the other hand, speaking to reporters in Istanbul, CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, citing his party's data, said he had won by nearly 28,000 votes.

Ankara has been governed by the AKP and its predecessors for the past 25 years, so these elections brought a paradigm shift in the governance of this symbolic city as the it will now governed by Mansur Yavas, the candidate of a secular-nationalistic opposition coalition. Yavas is known for his conciliatory rhetoric, and past experience in governing another municipality in Ankara.

Nationwide, with 91.7 percent of the provincial votes counted, the People's Alliance, which is comprised of the AK Party and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), had secured 51.7 percent of the votes.

It was followed by Nation Alliance, a coalition made up by the centre-left Republican People's Party (CHP) and the right-wing Good Party, with 37.6 percent, according to Al Jazeera.

The Turkish Communist Party (TKP) has won a city in eastern Turkey, Tunceli, for the first time in its history.

For Korkmaz, during the local elections, the unexpected result for many is that polarizing discourse of the government helped the opposition to re-mobilize their voters and re-unite all opposition against the People’s Alliance, and it changed the dynamics of the elections in the last phase.

Kurdish votes have influenced the results as the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) did not nominate any candidates in the metropolises this time in a bid to support the opposition’s “Nation Alliance” coalition in the West.

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