ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkey's top election authority voided the Istanbul mayoral election won by an opposition candidate and ordered a do-over, ruling Monday in favor of a request by the president's party to throw out the vote it narrowly lost.

 

 Opposition leaders said the Supreme Electoral Board's decision to invalidate the results from Istanbul's election raises concerns about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grip on power and Turkish democracy in general.

 

 A top aide for Erdogan told The Associated Press that the voiding of the mayoral election in Turkey's biggest city amounts to "a victory for Turkish democracy" by ensuring the results reflect the voters' choice.

 

 Ekrem Imamoglu of the opposition Republican People's Party placed first by a slim margin in the March 31 mayoral election, defeating the ruling party candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Erdogan's conservative and Islamic-based Justice and Development Party then charged that a series of election irregularities made the results illegitimate.

 

 Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency said the Supreme Electoral Board revoked Imamoglu's mandate and called a new election for June 23. As grounds to annul the March 31 results, the board said that some ballot station heads were not civil servants as required by law, the news agency said.

 

 Yildirim, the loser in the election, said he hoped the decision would lead to "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul."

 

 In a statement to the AP, presidential communications director Fahrettin Altun said: "Having held free and fair elections for nearly seven decades, Turkey will complete this process in a transparent, lawful and orderly manner."

 

 Leaders of the Imamoglu's main opposition party held an emergency meeting in the capital of Ankara late Monday.

 

 Addressing thousands of his supporters in Istanbul, Imamoglu accused the electoral board of bowing to pressure and threats from Erdogan's party. He vowed to use "democracy" to win back the "rights" that he said were taken away by force. The crowd called for the electoral board members to resign and accused Erdogan of stealing the vote.

 

 Kati Piri, the European Parliament's rapporteur on Turkey, said on Twitter: "This ends the credibility of democratic transition of power through elections in Turkey."

 

 Police set up barricades around the electoral board's headquarters in Turkey's capital, but there were no immediate signs of major demonstrations. Protesters banged pots and pans in several Istanbul neighborhoods, the opposition Birgun newspaper reported.

 

 Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at the nonprofit Project for Middle East Democracy and a Middle East history scholar at St. Lawrence University in New York, said Monday's ruling "removes the last fig leaf of competitive elections" hiding the erosion of democracy in Turkey.

 

 "Turkey wasn't democratic yesterday and it's not democratic today," Eissenstat said.

 

 He noted that Erdogan's party previously invalidated election results in Turkey's mostly Kurdish-populated regions after a pro-Kurdish party won and replaced elected mayors with government appointees.

 

 "Erdogan cannot afford to lose in the second round. It would a disastrous display of weakness," Eissenstat said.

 

 The local elections held across Turkey on March 31 produced setbacks for the president. His party lost city hall in the capital as well as in Istanbul, ending 25 years of the Justice and Development Party and its Islamist predecessor governing both cities.

 

 The loss of Istanbul, the country's commercial and cultural capital, was particularly hard for Erdogan. He began his political ascent as Istanbul's mayor.

 

 At pre-election rallies, the president had repeatedly told crowds, "Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey" and "Whoever loses Istanbul, loses Turkey."

 

 Istanbul, with its 15 million residents and strategic location straddling Europe and Asia, accounted for 31% of Turkey's GDP of $851 billion in 2017 and draws millions of tourists.

 

 The city government had a budget of $8.8 billion last year. The municipality has awarded lucrative contracts to businesses close to the government over the years and offers huge financial resources and employment opportunities.</s>ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Former Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim will again be the ruling AK Party’s candidate in next month’s re-run of the Istanbul mayoral election, President Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on Tuesday.

Yildirim narrowly lost the March 31 Istanbul election to the main opposition candidate, but the High Election Board ruled on Monday to annul the vote over various irregularities and called a fresh contest for June 23.</s>Turkish election authorities have voided a major election victory for the country's main opposition party, according to Turkish state media. A re-run of the election for the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city, will reportedly be held on June 23.

Ekrem Imamoglu from the opposition Republican People's Party (known as the CHP) narrowly won the mayor's race on March 31.

Imamoglu denounced the Turkish election authority in a speech to supporters on Monday, saying that they had buckled under pressure from the government, as Reuters reported. ">

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, which has held that position of mayor of Istanbul for some 25 years, had file a complaint against the result.

Erdogan had said that there were "clearly irregularities" in the voting, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported from Istanbul. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the country's Supreme Election Council ruled in favor of the ruling Justice and Development Party's complaint by seven votes to four.

"You are free to compete against the [ruling] AKP in an election, but you are not allowed to win," CHP deputy chairman Onursal Adiguzel said in a tweet. "This order, in which the will of the people is trampled on and the laws are ignored, is neither democratic nor legitimate. This is a downright dictatorship!"

The ruling party candidate, Binali Yildirim, has said that he hoped the ruling would mean "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul," as Reuters reported.

The Turkish lira tumbled on Monday afternoon as reports emerged of a re-run.

According to local newspaper Hurriyet, the AKP had alleged that "there were tens of thousands of ineligible voters who cast votes in the elections and that scores of polling station officials were appointed against regulations."

Some observers say the decision erodes democracy in Turkey.

"Until now, it was one man, one vote, from now on it is: vote until the governing party wins," said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Today's decision to reverse the Istanbul mayoral election is the greatest distortion of democratic elections in Turkey since the country's first free and fair polls in 1950."

Erdogan's party also lost the mayor's race in Ankara, the country's capital, in the March country-wide municipal elections where he was actively campaigning for his party's candidates.

Erdogan himself was mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s. As the BBC notes, he has often remarked, "Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey."</s>Turkey's Supreme Election Council (YSK) has ruled for a rerun of local elections in Istanbul, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party)'s YSK representative Recep Özel said Monday.

The YSK ruled seven against four 4 in favor and annulled the results of the mayoral election in Istanbul. The renewed election will be held on June 23.

The top election body also decided to file a criminal complaint against the chairman and members of the district election council, election managers and other persons responsible for appointing polling staffs unlawfully.

Özel said the decision was based on unsigned results documents from the March 31 election and on some ballot box officials not being civil servants.

"With this decision, our demand for re-election has been vindicated,'' he said.

The YSK also rejected objections to election results in Istanbul's Maltepe and Büyükçekmece districts.

The mayoral certificate of the main opposition Republican People's Party's (CHP) Ekrem Imamoğlu has also been canceled by the council.

The CHP will hold an extraordinary assembly meeting on Tuesday under the chairmanship of the party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently chairing his party's Central Executive Board's (MYK) extraordinary meeting at the party's headquarters.

The decision to re-hold mayoral elections comes in the wake of new pieces of evidence AK Party has uncovered.

Millions of Turkish voters cast their votes nationwide on March 31 in local elections to choose mayors, city council members, and other officials for the next five years.

Elections in Istanbul, where Nation Alliance candidate from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Ekrem İmamoğlu was awarded the certificate of the election with only a 13,729-vote difference were followed by lengthy discussions and objections by parties demanding a do-over election due to irregularities and unlawfulness. After the elections, the AK Party submitted an extraordinary objection to the YSK for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Maltepe Municipality and Büyükçekmece Municipality two weeks ago to cancel and redo the Istanbul municipal election.

The AK Party's extraordinary objection concerned four categories: Irregularities in vote count sheets, serious discrepancies between the number of registered voters and the number of voting ballots, some balloting committee chairmen and members not being government employees as required by law and ineligible voters participating in the polls. According to the AK Party, there were significant discrepancies among tabulated results with wet signatures and stamps, showing the first vote record, the final record and the total number of votes submitted to the YSK. There were also empty or unsigned voting records and irregular registrations of voters.

A probe of irregularities found that dozens of members of balloting committees linked the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), the group behind the 2016 defeated coup in Turkey.

Of 43 committee members allegedly linked to FETÖ, 41 were found to be customers of Bank Asya, a FETÖ-linked bank, two were users of ByLock, the terror group's encrypted messaging app, and two were members of FETÖ-linked labor unions.</s>Ankara/Istanbul — Turkey’s High Election Board on Monday scrapped Istanbul election results showing a painful defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responding to his AK Party’s calls for a rerun of the vote in a decision that hit the lira and raised charges of conflicts of interest.

While the board, known as YSK, had not yet made a statement, the decision was announced by state-run Anadolu agency and a representative of the ruling AK Party (AKP), Recep Ozel, who said a second vote would take place on June 23.

Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which in the initial vote on March 31 narrowly won the mayoralty in the country’s largest city, called the ruling a “plain dictatorship”. The AKP had appealed for an election re-run after initial results and a series of recounts showed it had lost control of Istanbul for the first time in 25 years.

It was a shock loss for Erdogan who in the 1990s served as the city’s mayor and had campaigned hard ahead of the nationwide local vote, his first electoral test since 2018’s sharp currency crisis tipped the Turkish economy into recession.

The Turkish lira weakened after Ozel, the AKP’s representative on the YSK, tweeted the decision, and it was at 6.1075 against the dollar at 17.30 GMT and on track for its worst day in more than a month.

The lira has tumbled about 10% since a week before the initial election. Suspense over the ruling had left investors worried that weeks of additional campaigning would divert funds and attention from addressing economic reforms.</s>In a defeat for Turkey's opposition, election officials have voided the results of the race for mayor of Istanbul and ordered a new election. The ruling party had challenged the results.</s>ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A representative for Turkey’s ruling AK Party (AKP) said on Monday the country’s High Election Board has set June 23 for a re-run of local elections in Istanbul.

Earlier, the AKP representative on the election board (YSK), Recep Ozel, said the YSK had decided to annul results from the March 31 vote that showed a painful loss for President Tayyip Erdogan in the country’s largest city.</s>ISTANBUL (AP) — The Latest on disputed mayoral elections in Turkey (all times local):

Turkey's state-run news agency says the country's highest electoral body has ruled for a rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party challenged the legitimacy of the vote an opposition candidate narrowly won.

Anadolu Agency said the Supreme Electoral Board on Monday ruled in favor of Erdogan's conservative and Islamic-based party and annulled the results of the March 31 local election in Istanbul. It was not immediately clear when the election would be repeated.

In a major setback to Erdogan's 16-year rule, the opposition took control of local governments in the capital of Ankara and Istanbul, ending the ruling party's decades-long control of both cities.

Erdogan's party challenged the results in Istanbul, maintaining that alleged irregularities had affected the outcome.

Turkey's highest electoral board is meeting to decide whether an opposition politician is the rightful winner of Istanbul's mayoral race — or whether a new election must be held.

Ekrem Imamoglu narrowly won the race for mayor of Istanbul in Turkey's March 31 local elections, defeating ruling party candidate Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is however, challenging the result, citing alleged irregularities that it insists impacted the result of the vote. It wants the election in the city to be repeated.

The Supreme Electoral Board began its deliberations on Monday. A decision could come later or in the next few days.</s>If, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is fond of saying, "whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey," then his country's future now hangs in the balance.

On Monday, Turkey's Supreme Electoral Board (YSK) announced that March's Istanbul mayoral election, which ended in a narrow opposition victory, would be annulled and re-run in June. The decision, after weeks of government pressure, is a watershed moment for Turkey — and a monumental gamble for Erdoğan.

On one hand, the re-run gives the Turkish president the chance to retain control of Europe's largest city, where Erdoğan's conservative political movement has held sway for a quarter century. Yet it also risks empowering the opposition, and threatens to undermine his legitimacy as Turkey's leader.

"Erdoğan has built his legacy on being a popular and populist politician who’s able to win elections," said Paul T. Levin, director of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies.

"The elections have not been fair, but it has been enough for him to claim to his supporters and the broader Turkish public that he is the man who is entitled to lead Turkey. This decision puts even this very thin democratic veneer into question."

Turkey's elections have long been considered unfair — as the playing field is stacked heavily in favor of Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) — but nevertheless competitive, with the opposition managing to force several close races in past elections.

In 2015, Erdoğan called a snap election shortly after a general election in which the AKP lost its parliamentary majority, but only after coalition talks failed (although Erdoğan worked to ensure that they would not succeed, going as far as to fan the flames of internal conflict). In Kurdish-majority cities, the AKP replaced several elected mayors with government trustees, citing terrorism charges. Never before, however, has Erdoğan refused to accept an election result outright.

"The pillars of democracy in Turkey have been wiped out over the last decade or so. Elections were not free and fair, but the result was taken as it was," said Ezgi Basaran, Turkey program coordinator at Oxford University's St. Antony's College.

"Since the 1950s, the ballot box was the only place where people in Turkey can voice their opinions freely," she added. "This is a tradition — we usually have an 80 percent turnout."

While the decision to annul was taken by the YSK, rather than the government itself, the independence of Turkey's top election authority is highly questionable. Erdoğan and other officials had put intense pressure on the YSK to cancel the vote over the past weeks, citing irregularities.

And as the Council of Europe's Venice Commission noted last year, the YSK's impartiality is "contingent on the independence of its judges as such." The AKP has for years undermined judicial independence, politicizing Turkey's courts.

European politicians and officials were swift to condemn the cancellation, with ALDE's European Parliament leader Guy Verhofstadt warning that "Turkey is drifting towards a dictatorship" and the European Parliament's Turkey rapporteur Kati Piri saying "this ends the credibility of democratic transition of power" in Turkey.

In mid-April, local election authorities confirmed opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu as mayor following a partial recount. İmamoğlu beat his rival, the AKP's Binali Yıldırım, by about 13,000 votes in a city of 10 million eligible voters.

The cancellation appears to have energized the opposition. In a speech on Monday, a determined İmamoğlu called the decision "treacherous" and told his supporters that they would win again in the June 23 re-run.

Levin said the annulment has "helped create something the opposition lacked" — namely "a dynamic political figure who can be the focal point of opposition to Erdoğan." A candidate of the secular Republican People's Party (CHP) with a conservative background, İmamoğlu has the ability to attract a broad spectrum of voters.

The cancellation also brings other risks for Erdoğan: The AKP is reportedly split on the issue, and the uncertainty brought about by the YSK's decision has further weakened the Turkish lira at a time when the country's economy is in recession.

The Turkish Industry and Business Association gently expressed concern over the re-run, prompting Erdoğan on Tuesday to tell businessmen to "know their place."

Turkey's economic woes were a key issue in the country's nationwide municipal elections on March 31, in which the AKP lost control of the capital Ankara and several other provinces. The Istanbul vote is the only municipal election to have been canceled.

Erdoğan seems to have decided that he cannot afford to lose his hometown, where he rose to prominence as mayor in the 1990s. More than a symbol of his power, Turkey's largest city also has a budget to match its size, a significant element of the patronage network the AKP has established.

"Istanbul municipality, for example, has been funding all sorts of foundations that are AKP-run," Basaran said. The municipality has also tended to award lucrative infrastructure contracts to AKP-friendly businessmen.

It's far from certain, however, that the AKP's candidate will win the June re-run. The opposition, having tasted victory for the first time in decades, is gearing up for a fierce fight. And with observers at every ballot box, "outright vote-rigging is very difficult," Levin said.

Yet Erdoğan is unlikely to have pushed for a re-run without having a plan, given the risks involved. In the first weeks after the election, the president at times appeared prepared to accept defeat before changing his tune.

"It’s a gamble, but he’s gambled before and come out on top," said Levin. "He must believe he has a way to win ... never underestimate Erdoğan."</s>Turkish election authorities have voided a major election victory for the country's main opposition party, according to Turkish state media. A re-run of the election for the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city, will reportedly be held on June 23.

Ekrem Imamoglu from the opposition Republican People's Party (known as the CHP) narrowly won the mayor's race on March 31.

Imamoglu denounced the Turkish election authority in a speech to supporters on Monday, saying that they had buckled under pressure from the government, as Reuters reported. "They were placed under political pressure from day one."

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, which has held that position of mayor of Istanbul for some 25 years, had file a complaint against the result.

Erdogan had said that there were "clearly irregularities" in the voting, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported from Istanbul. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the country's Supreme Election Council ruled in favor of the ruling Justice and Development Party's complaint by seven votes to four.

"You are free to compete against the [ruling] AKP in an election, but you are not allowed to win," CHP deputy chairman Onursal Adiguzel said in a tweet. "This order, in which the will of the people is trampled on and the laws are ignored, is neither democratic nor legitimate. This is a downright dictatorship!"

The ruling party candidate, Binali Yildirim, has said that he hoped the ruling would mean "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul," as Reuters reported.

The Turkish lira tumbled on Monday afternoon as reports emerged of a re-run.

According to local newspaper Hurriyet, the AKP had alleged that "there were tens of thousands of ineligible voters who cast votes in the elections and that scores of polling station officials were appointed against regulations."

Some observers say the decision erodes democracy in Turkey.

"Until now, it was one man, one vote, from now on it is: vote until the governing party wins," said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Today's decision to reverse the Istanbul mayoral election is the greatest distortion of democratic elections in Turkey since the country's first free and fair polls in 1950."

Erdogan's party also lost the mayor's race in Ankara, the country's capital, in the March country-wide municipal elections where he was actively campaigning for his party's candidates.

Erdogan himself was mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s. As the BBC notes, he has often remarked, "Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey."
After a narrow victory of Turkey's main opposition party CHP against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP in Istanbul's mayoral election last month, Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council annulled the results and ordered a rerun of the election for the mayor of Istanbul.