Istanbul Revote Pits Erdogan's Party Against Deposed Challenger
Stakes are High for Erdogan as Istanbul Heads for a Revote
(Bloomberg) -- Polls are open again in Istanbul as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party tries to extend its quarter century of rule in Turkey’s biggest city after forcing a controversial rerun of a mayoral election.
More than 10 million people are eligible to vote, and the candidates put a priority on getting some of the 1.7 million who didn’t cast ballots in the last round to go to the polls on Sunday.
The March 31 tally, overturned on appeal to the elections board, gave the opposition challenger, CHP’s Ekrem Imamoglu, a margin of only about 14,000 votes over a former prime minister and candidate of the ruling AK Party, Binali Yildirim.
Gizem Konak, 26, said she’s always supported the pro-Kurdish HDP party -- until now.
“This time I voted for Imamoglu,” she said in Kucukcekmece, a suburb of Istanbul. “This guy may be the only one to unite opposition parties under one roof in so many years. I think Imamoglu has the potential to change the destiny of this country.”
The AK Party’s narrow defeat in March laid bare new vulnerabilities Erdogan faces after 16 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. With Turkey’s economy reeling, it was a stinging slap in the president’s hometown just a year after he was re-elected with sweeping new powers.
Polls can’t be published within the last 10 days before the vote but earlier surveys suggested that Imamoglu, a former Istanbul district leader, was in the lead. Erdogan has said he’d accept the results of the vote.
Days before the election, Imamoglu received critical support from a prominent Kurdish politician who’s been in prison since 2016 on terrorism-related charges he denies. Selahattin Demirtas, the former HDP leader, called on voters to support Imamoglu instead of voting for “revenge, hatred or grudges” in Turkey’s acutely polarized political climate.
Defeat in the nation’s commercial hub, home to about a fifth of Turkey’s more than 82 million people, would strip Erdogan’s party of a major source of patronage and handouts. By some estimates, the city absorbs a quarter of all public investment and accounts for a third of the country’s $748 billion economy.
‘Correct Decision’
“I believe the voters will make the correct decision for Istanbul,” Erdogan said after casting his vote on Sunday.
After the board’s decision in May, the lira weakened the most in emerging markets and stocks were battered as investors fretted over what they saw as the erosion of the rule of law. Although unemployment has stabilized, the economy remains in distress.
Erdogan’s party had already lost the capital, Ankara, and some other big cities in the March balloting as inflation, unemployment and a plunge in the lira took their toll. But he refused to concede defeat in Istanbul, crying voter fraud, and Turkey’s top election board concurred.
In a last-ditch effort to tar Imamoglu, Erdogan alleged on Tuesday that he was backed by enemy forces: the U.S.-based preacher the president accuses of mounting a failed 2016 coup attempt against him, and a party Erdogan sees as the political wing of the autonomy-seeking Kurdish PKK group Turkey’s been battling since the 1980s.
Erdogan also called for prosecuting Imamoglu for allegedly insulting a provincial governor. The Turkish leader himself lost his seat as the mayor of Istanbul after he was imprisoned for four months in 1999 for reciting an Islamic poem deemed a threat to Turkey’s secular order.
“Like how my mayoralty was nullified, so could his be canceled if he’s sentenced” long enough, Erdogan said.
An Imamoglu win could touch off an early presidential vote to prevent his gaining political traction, said Murat Gezici, head of the Gezici polling company.
It could “create political havoc within the ruling AK party, possibly leading to the formation of new political parties and bringing about early elections later this year or early next,” Gezici said.
--With assistance from Cagan Koc and Taylan Bilgic.
To contact the reporters on this story: Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara at shacaoglu@bloomberg.net;Firat Kozok in Ankara at fkozok@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Onur Ant at oant@bloomberg.net, Paul Abelsky, Nicholas Larkin
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