President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan acknowledged the election results as a turning point for Turkey, but promised to respect the results.
The candidates of Turkey’s most prominent opposition party, CHP, have declared themselves the winners in the country’s largest city, Istanbul, and the capital, Ankara.
Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem İmamoğlu and the mayor of Ankara Mansur Yavaş were clearly ahead of the president in the vote count late on Sunday evening Recep Tayyip Erdoğan His opponents representing the AKP party.
Istanbul was President Erdoğan’s main target as he tried to win key cities from the opposition. Erdogan himself served as the city’s mayor in 1994-1998. He recently described Istanbul as the country’s jewel and treasure at a campaign event.
İmamoğlu is widely seen as the strongest challenger to Erdoğan and the AKP in the next presidential election, which will be held in 2028. However, Erdogan has hinted that this year’s local elections will be his last.
Erdoğan acknowledged the election results as a turning point for Turkey, but promised to respect the results.
– Unfortunately, we did not get the results we wanted, he said at the election conference in Ankara.
The opposition is also strong elsewhere
The CHP candidates were in the lead while the counting of votes was still ongoing in other big cities as well, such as Ankara and Izmir and Antalya.
– Those who have been ignored sent a clear message to those who rule the country, Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş said at his election conference.
– The voters have decided to change the essence of Turkey. They want to open the door to a new political atmosphere in our country, said the chairman of the CHP Özgür Özel.
When slightly more than 87 percent of the votes had been counted, there was only a hair’s breadth of difference between the CHP and the AKP, according to CNN Türk. The CHP led the AKP at the regional level by only about 115,000 votes and in the mayoral race by only about 544,000 votes.
The CHP was also in the lead in some of the AKP’s core support areas, although the opposition this time was not as united as in the 2019 elections. According to analysts, the fact that the elections are held when inflation in the country is up to 67 percent could have worked in favor of the opposition. The Turkish lira has also been devalued, meaning a deliberate weakening of the currency’s value relative to foreign currencies.
The news is updated.