Erdoğan's Elections: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
by Burak Bekdil • September 2, 2019 at 5:00 am
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised party fans a clear election victory in Istanbul [on the June 23 rerun] -- but lost, this time, by a margin of more than 800,000 votes, compared to only 13,000 in the original race.
"Your wrath stems from the fear in you." — Meral Danış Baştas, Kurdish MP, replying to Erdoğan.
By using an administrative decision as a pretext to oust elected mayors, Erdogan is effectively nullifying millions of Kurdish votes. Moreover, if the ousted mayors actually had proven links to terrorist organizations, why were they allowed to run in an election in the first place?
This drama will probably continue: Kurds will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them. Kurds again will elect their leaders, Erdoğan will sack them too. Kurds will vote for other leaders and Erdoğan will sack them too.
Erdoğan should sit down, think and find out: why do his country's 20 million or so Kurds insist on invariably electing "terrorists" as mayors to their cities and towns, and defying his calls to do otherwise?
No one in the saner parts of the world has ever claimed that Turkey's Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a liberal democrat who never in the slightest rigged election results. But he was, at least, known to respect the ballot box. No longer. Erdoğan has taken to ridiculing even further whatever little remains of Turkey's democratic culture.
Claiming vote-rigging, he pressured Turkey's supreme election board for a recount of ballots cast on March 31 in Istanbul, Turkey biggest city, which boasts more than 10 million registered voters. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) had lost municipal elections in Istanbul by a small margin of 13,000 votes. This was the first time Erdoğan's party had lost elections in Istanbul since 1994. The man who is notorious for saying "who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey" immediately ordered a rerun.
