2024-04-01 14:29:57
Erdoğan speaks of a turning point – his opponents celebrate triumph
Updated April 1, 2024 – 12:36 p.mReading time: 3 min.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s opponents achieved important victories in local elections in Turkey. Observers speak of Erdoğan’s worst election defeat.
The opposition achieved a historic victory in the local elections in Turkey – while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamic conservative ruling party AKP suffered its worst electoral debacle in two decades. After almost all votes were counted on Monday, Erdoğan spoke of a “turning point” for his camp, which has been in power since 2002. The largest opposition party, the social democratic CHP, declared itself the winner in the country’s two largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara.
Erdoğan expressed disappointment with the results of local elections in Turkey. “We did not achieve the result we wanted and hoped for,” said Erdoğan on Monday night in Ankara. According to preliminary results, his party has suffered a massive loss of votes across the country.
Istanbul’s mayor: “We won the election”
In the metropolis of Istanbul, 26 of the 39 districts went to the CHP, and in the capital Ankara, 16 of 25 districts. CHP mayors also won in Izmir, Adana and Antalya. This time, the opposition was also able to win over several cities and provinces that were previously firmly in the hands of the AKP, including the city of Bursa, which is considered to be extremely conservative, and Adiyaman, which was hit hard by the earthquake in 2023.
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu announced his re-election on Sunday evening. “We are in first place with a lead of more than a million votes,” Imamoğlu of the social democratic opposition party CHP told reporters in Istanbul. “We won the election,” he added, explaining that 96 percent of the ballot boxes had been counted.
The election marks “the end of democratic erosion in Turkey and the resurgence of democracy,” Imamoğlu said, calling his victory “of great significance.”
Imamoğlu’s supporters had previously flocked to the city administration headquarters. The 52-year-old CHP politician surprisingly won the mayoral election in the metropolis in 2019. You can read more about Imamoğlu, who is seen as the opposition’s hope, here. The incumbent mayor Mansur Yavas of the CHP had previously declared himself the winner of the election in Ankara.
Erdoğan stated that regaining Istanbul was his election goal
Both mayors belong to the opposition CHP party and had to prevail in the election against challengers from Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party.
Before Imamoğlu’s surprising election victory in 2019, Istanbul had been in the hands of the AKP and its predecessor parties for 25 years. Erdoğan himself started his political career in the metropolis on the Bosporus in 1994 when he was elected mayor there.
Imamoğlu’s victory will strengthen him within the opposition with a view to becoming the top candidate in the next presidential election, explained Bayram Balci from the Ceri-Sciences Po University in Paris. If Erdoğan had succeeded in regaining Istanbul and Ankara, he would have taken this “as an encouragement to change the constitution in order to run again in 2028 and seek a fourth term in office.”
Newspaper: “Revolution at the ballot box”
Observers spoke of Erdogan’s worst electoral defeat since his party came to power in 2002. Many blamed high inflation and the drastic devaluation of the lira last year.
The result “can only be explained by the economy,” wrote journalist Abdulkadir Selvi in the pro-government newspaper “Hürriyet”. “A new wind” is blowing through Turkey. The secular anti-government daily “Sözcü” announced a “revolution at the ballot box”, while the major opposition newspaper “Cumhuriyet” spoke of a “historic victory”.
The president had made the recovery of Istanbul his election goal and sent his former environment minister Murat Kurum into the race there. He had also hoped for an AKP victory in the opposition-run cities of Ankara and Izmir.
“We will honestly assess the results of the elections in our party’s organs and courageously exercise self-criticism,” Erdoğan told his supporters.