...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
’s second-largest city of Istanbul remains in doubt as President Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey...’s ruling party is challenging the initial results, which gave the main opposition party a slight lead in one of the economic hub’s tightest election races in decades.
Municipal elections were held across Turkey on Sunday. Erdogan’s alliance led by the ruling Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, succeeded in securing over 51 percent of the vote nationally, leading him to declare an overall victory.
The AKP, however, suffered a major upset as results showed it had lost not only the political center, Ankara, and the third-largest city of Izmir, but also probably Istanbul, which is Turkey’s commercial center and Erdogan’s home city.
Erdogan and his AKP had not lost a local election in Ankara or Istanbul in nearly two decades.
"Because WE count the votes, Gulenists!"
As of Monday afternoon, with over 99 percent of the ballots cast in Istanbul counted, the AKP’s candidate and former prime minister Binali Yildirim, had received 4.13 million votes, while Ekrem Imamoglu, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, had won 4.16 million.
The chairman of Turkey’s Supreme Election Board (YSK), Sadi Guven, said on Monday that Imamoglu was leading by nearly 28,000 votes with most ballots counted.
"So far a total of 31,102 ballot box results [in Istanbul] have been registered to the system, 84 ballot box results have not been concluded because of objections," he said.
The CHP’s candidate claimed victory in the Istanbul elections and urged the AKP not to resort to unnecessary means to challenge the outcome.
Yildirim ‐ who had initially said that he had won the race by around 4,000 votes -- admitted later that he was 25,000 votes behind Imamoglu.