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’s main opposition party said on Wednesday it had formally requested the annulment of President Tayyip Erdogan’s mandate because the same flaws his AK Party alleged in the city’s March 31 mayoral vote occurred in last year’s national elections.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP) also said votes for Istanbul officials and councils, submitted in the same envelopes as the mayoral election, should be cancelled if the mayoral vote is re-run. The AK Party (AKP) won a majority in the councils.
After weeks of appeals by the AKP and their nationalist MHP allies, Turkey’s High Election Board (YSK) ruled on Monday for a re-run of the Istanbul mayoral election, which was dramatically won by the CHP’s Ekrem Imamoglu with a razor-thin majority.
It was the first time in 25 years that the AKP or its Islamist predecessors had failed to win control of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city with a budget of close to $4 billion. Erdogan launched his own political career as Istanbul mayor.
In its ruling, which also annulled Imamoglu’s mandate, the YSK cited irregularities in the appointment of polling station officials. Erdogan’s party said the fact that individuals who were not public servants had been appointed to the polling stations amounted to organised crime.
However,
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the YSK left results for district administrators, municipal councils and local officials unchanged, a decision which the CHP said was nonsense because all four votes were cast in the same envelopes and counted by the same polling officials.
"If you’re revoking Ekrem Imamoglu’s mandate ... then you must also annul President Erdogan’s mandate because the same laws, same regulations, same applications, same polling stations and conditions were present in both elections," CHP Deputy Chairman Muharrem Erkek told news hounds.
"Why are you not cancelling the results that came out of the same envelopes," he said.
In his first comments after the YSK’s decision, Erdogan said on Tuesday that the elections had been marred by "organised irregularity". Asked about the ruling, Imamoglu said democracy was the victim.