bhe local elections in Turkey are facing a serious setback for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's party. After 30 percent of the votes were counted, the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) was ahead of Erdoğan's AKP with 39 percent nationwide. In Istanbul, the country's cultural and economic center, incumbent Ekrem Immamoğlu of the CHP was heading for re-election. “The picture we see makes us very happy,” Immamoğlu said around three hours after the polls closed. At the same time, he called for patience and vigilance: “No election is over until it is over.”
A victory for Imamoğlu would be a defeat for Erdoğan, even though he was not on the ballot. The AKP's election campaign was tailored to the president, who mobilized his state apparatus to recapture the metropolis, which was also symbolically important for him, for his party. The AKP candidate himself, Murat Kurum, stood in Erdoğan's shadow. A number of national cabinet ministers campaigned for him. The president appeared at more than 30 campaign events across the country in the past two weeks.
In the capital Ankara, there are also signs that the incumbent CHP mayor Mansur Yavaş will be re-elected.
State news agency server collapses
The election is an expression of great dissatisfaction with the high inflation of around 67 percent. The minimum wage, for which more than half of the working population works, is no longer even enough to feed a family healthily, let alone pay for rent and clothing.
When the first results were announced two and a half hours after the polls closed, the website of the official Anadolu news agency showed a map with the entire west of the country colored red. Red is the color of the opposition party CHP. Then the agency's server crashed.
Unlike previous local elections, the CHP is heading for victories not only in coastal provinces and metropolises, but also in some conservative provinces in central Anatolia, which were previously considered Erdoğan's voter base. The local elections therefore have the potential to upend Turkey's political landscape.
From the AKP's point of view, the successes of the New Welfare Party are also worrying. Its chairman Fatih Erbakan is the son of former Erdoğan mentor Necmettin Erbakan, who is one of the forefathers of the Islamist movement in Turkey. The party only broke away from an alliance with the AKP shortly before the local elections and appeals to the same groups of voters. Erbakan pushed Erdoğan ahead of him with demands for pension increases and a cessation of trade with Israel. In the previous AKP strongholds of Şanlıurfa and Yozgat, a victory for the New Welfare Party seemed possible.
The election was overshadowed by allegations of manipulation. The Kurdish DEM party accused the government of bringing tens of thousands of soldiers and police officers from outside to vote in Kurdish-majority areas in the southeast of the country. The presidential office contradicted the allegations. The security forces are registered in the respective electoral districts. For security reasons, they were driven to the polling stations in buses.
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