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Troubles In Turkey


lucklucky

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I'm quite certain the recounting will continue until the desired result is achieved, at least in Istanbul where it was only a margin of 25k people.

Edited by Josh
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A good chunk of rural Turkey is Kurdish, that could create another Syrian scenario, and you can guess who Putin and China will support.

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I dont think Turkey will descend into civil war for years, maybe a decade. But "Just The Tayyip" is ultimately going to cling to power and become another Maduro. He already IIRC can dissolve parliament after the last constitution change, so the path to dictatorship is clear: win elections until you can't then declare the system invalid when you finally have to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

April 17, 2019 / 2:16 PM / Updated an hour ago

Turkey's opposition takes office in Istanbul, appeal still pending

ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey’s main opposition candidate was declared Istanbul’s mayor on Wednesday after election recounts were finally completed, despite an appeal still pending by President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party to re-run the vote in the country’s largest city.

The final result of the March 31 local elections showed a narrow victory for the secularist opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Turkey’s commercial hub, ending 25 years of control by the AK Party (AKP) and its Islamist predecessors.

 

The loss is especially hard for Erdogan, who launched his political career in Istanbul as mayor in the 1990s and has triumphed in more than a dozen elections since his Islamist-rooted AKP came to power in 2002.

 

The Turkish lira, which has dipped since the election, firmed on Wednesday.

 

As he formally took office after a campaign which featured months of harsh rhetoric from Erdogan’s AK Party and more than two weeks of challenges and recounts, Ekrem Imamoglu promised to work for all 16 million residents of the city.

 

“We never gave up, we never gave up on our battle for democracy and rights,” he told supporters at Istanbul’s municipality building. “We are aware of our responsibilities and the needs of this city. We will start to serve immediately.”

 

Imamoglu’s margin of victory - the final count put him some 13,000 votes, or less than 0.2 percentage points, ahead of the AK Party candidate and former prime minister Binali Yildirim - prompted several AKP challenges.

 

On Tuesday, after 16 days of appeals and recounts, the AKP asked the High Election Board (YSK) to annul and re-run the election in Istanbul over what it said were irregularities. Its nationalist MHP allies made a similar request on Wednesday.

 

“We are aware there are ongoing processes... We hope the relevant authorities will complete these processes in the most sensitive and just way,” Imamoglu said.

 

[...]

 

While the AKP was defeated in the battle for Istanbul mayor, results showed the party had won most seats in its municipal councils. The AKP’s re-run appeal applies only to the mayoral elections, not those for municipal councils.

 

Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of Teneo political risk advisers, said it was puzzling to call only for a re-run of the mayoral elections, and added that some of the areas where the AKP claimed fraud took place were under its responsibility.

 

[...]

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-election/turkeys-opposition-takes-office-in-istanbul-appeal-still-pending-idUSKCN1RT1EG

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A good chunk of rural Turkey is Kurdish, that could create another Syrian scenario, and you can guess who Putin and China will support.

 

Missed this part. Actually a civil war more or less already happened/is happening in the Kurdish areas, you just won't hear about it since "Just The Tayyip" controls the local media.

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There was even more serious civil war in the '90s, with scores of dead, none heard about that either.

Edited by bojan
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Well, with the bombings of tourist locations, I suppose a lot of those "other people" noticed it as well; the capture of Öczalan and his process certainly also made the headlines. Of course, that was more or less the culmination of the situation in the 1990s, and ironically it was the AKP that then managed to lessen the tensions with the Kurds ... before ole Tayyip needed to whip up the nationalists in the months leading up to elections and the change of the constitution to give him moar powah, so he kicked off this latest war against the "Mountain Turks" (as the Kemalists like to call them in denial of the cultural and ethnical minority status that the Kurds deserve), and criminalized their party (which, accidentally, happened to be the most popular opposition party; nothing to be seen here, folks, move along).

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Well, with the bombings of tourist locations, I suppose a lot of those "other people" noticed it as well; the capture of Öczalan and his process certainly also made the headlines. Of course, that was more or less the culmination of the situation in the 1990s, and ironically it was the AKP that then managed to lessen the tensions with the Kurds ... before ole Tayyip needed to whip up the nationalists in the months leading up to elections and the change of the constitution to give him moar powah, so he kicked off this latest war against the "Mountain Turks" (as the Kemalists like to call them in denial of the cultural and ethnical minority status that the Kurds deserve), and criminalized their party (which, accidentally, happened to be the most popular opposition party; nothing to be seen here, folks, move along).

 

Abdulla Ocalan eh? That's a name I ain't heard in years...I used to insult a 'Turkish' guy on IMDB by saying, 'watch out! Ocalan's gonna get ya!'

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  • 2 months later...

The writing on the wall that could spell disaster for Erdoğan in Istanbul election

A shock mayoral win in March led the government to void elections. Polls suggest a new ballot on Sunday may boost the anti-government vote

 

Bethan McKernan in Istanbul

Sat 22 Jun 2019 19.00 BST

Last modified on Sun 23 Jun 2019 08.42 BST

 

The graffiti appeared in Istanbul’s Gayrettepe neighbourhood one morning last month. It showed the word “justice” written on a piece of paper held up by a disembodied hand. With a lighter, the other hand was setting fire to it.

 

“Write down ‘justice’ on a bit of paper. And then burn its corners,” the tag read. Within a day it had vanished, painted over by a municipality cleaning team. For the Istanbul street artist who goes by the name of Pepe, work is a constant game of cat-and-mouse with authorities seeking to remove his political creations.

 

“I drew that when the AKP (Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party) cancelled the Istanbul election,” he said, sitting at a bar on Friday, two days before the city goes back to the polls in a controversial rerun today.

 

“We have a right to free and fair information that Turkish media suppresses these days. They do a good job of shutting down the opposition. But they’ll never completely manage it.”

 

That cat-and-mouse struggle, writ large, has been playing out across Istanbul this weekend as the AKP seeks to undo the mayoral victory of opposition coalition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu. In the March election the previously unknown figure delivered one of the biggest challenges to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s grip on Turkey in years. Although the governing AKP and nationalist party coalition secured more than 50% of the vote across the country in the 31 March polls, voters delivered an unexpected slap to Erdoğan’s party in four major cities, widely viewed as a rebuke for his handling of Turkey’s burgeoning financial crisis. Istanbul, governed by the AKP and its Islamist party predecessors for 25 years, was the most painful loss. The city constitutes one third of the entire Turkish economy and is the main driver of the AKP’s patronage networks. The president, who began his political career here as mayor in the 1990s and often talks about his deep love for his hometown, also viewed it as a personal rejection.

 

While critics say Erdoğan’s expanded presidential powers are helping erode Turkey’s democratic structures, in March voter turnout – traditionally high across the country – still stood at 84%. On election night many Istanbullus who had dejectedly shown up at polling stations to carry out their democratic duty earlier in the day watched the live results at first with curiosity, and then excitement. When the live stream of results from the government news agency stopped at about 9pm, people across the country realised İmamoğlu, the People’s Republican party (CHP) candidate, was pulling ahead of his AKP rival, powerful and well-funded former prime minister Binali Yildirim.

 

[...]

 

Five weeks after the election, Turkey’s electoral board upheld one of the dozens of complaints made by the AKP and declared the race for mayor of Istanbul must be rerun, triggering an outcry from opposition parties and even from members of the AKP itself, who worried the rerun would dent the party’s democratic credentials.

 

The decision has, curiously, turned İmamoğlu into both victor and victim, now fighting on a platform of saving Turkish democracy. The softly spoken 49-year-old has become a household name across Turkey, welcomed as a breath of political fresh air and touted as a possible presidential candidate in 2023.

 

In inclusive, conciliatory speeches – the opposite of those of the firebrand politicians who have come to dominate Turkey’s polarised political scene – İmamoğlu talked about the need for the city to come together to overcome problems with unemployment and the rising cost of living.

 

He won hearts and minds in pious and working-class AKP neighbourhoods all over the city by showing up to meetings and reaching out both by knocking on doors and through social media across Istanbul’s ethnic, political and religious divides. Yildirim, in contrast, was almost completely sidelined by the president himself, who held huge rallies where he framed the local elections as a matter of “national survival” and accused opposition parties of links to terrorism.

 

[...]

 

Despite the best efforts of Yildirim’s team, according to more reliable polls, two days ahead of the rerun İmamoğlu’s lead widened to about 8-9% – meaning the AKP is facing the humiliating prospect of losing again.

 

In the past few days, the usually solid AKP election platform has wobbled. Erdoğan has lashed out at İmamoğlu, hinting he is in league with the outlawed Kurdish People’s Workers party (PKK), and a bizarre last-minute tactic – a message from jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan urging potential swing-voter Kurds not to vote for the CHP – backfired after Kurdish political parties reiterated their support for İmamoğlu. “Conservative Kurds, people who used to vote for the AKP, have woken up,” said Hassan Kaplan, 27, one of Istanbul’s estimated 4 million Kurds. “I’m scared there is too much expectation on İmamoğlu, but he’s the only person who has given us hope in a while.”

 

Neither AKP nor CHP supporters know what to expect when Sunday’s results come in or what course of action the president might take if faced with another unsatisfactory result. Street protests are rare in Istanbul these days, quickly broken up by police – but any fresh attempt to overturn a second İmamoğlu victory could trigger unrest in new and unexpected parts of the city.

 

Everyone in Istanbul knows what happens in the vote will have profound implications for the city and the country. On a wall in the shopping district of Osmanbey, the faces of Pepe’s Her şey çok güzel olacak mural smile at passers-by. For now, at least, it has not been taken down. “It doesn’t matter if they do,” Pepe said. “The city is fired up. Even if they steal the election again, the cracks in their armour are there. We know that now.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/22/istanbul-mayor-election-rerun-vote-may-be-turning-point-in-democracy-battle

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"Polls suggest a new ballot on Sunday may boost the anti-government vote."

 

That would be the fitting reward for trying to steal an election.

Erdogan and his AKP gang have been ruling since 2003. Accumulating opposiiton to their actions and corruption placing their amigos everywhere. Invading Syria is probably also not too well liked. Economy seems also going into a downswing after years of boom that carried the AKP, which has the writing is on the wall, that the pendulum is going to swing the other direction soon. Whcih explains the AKP's actions to manipulate the elecitons.

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I'm just curious whether Erdogan will dare to nix the results again if that happens. He hasn't been terribly helpful to prevent it, anyway, like accusing Imamoglu of being a crypto-Greek because he's from Trabzon, which has a considerable population of Pontic Greeks. Seems he collaterally insulted lots of Istanbul voters who have come from the same city in recent years. Whoops.

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I'm just curious whether Erdogan will dare to nix the results again if that happens. He hasn't been terribly helpful to prevent it, anyway, like accusing Imamoglu of being a crypto-Greek because he's from Trabzon, which has a considerable population of Pontic Greeks. Seems he collaterally insulted lots of Istanbul voters who have come from the same city in recent years. Whoops.

 

Erdogan himself comes from a greek convert family. ooops.

 

 

Breaking news. The regime candidate conceded his defeat.

 

For Erdogan it started with getting the mayor office in the nineties. Well, he is not going to sleep well tonight.

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June 23 2019 19:25:00

 

First unofficial result of Istanbul elections: CHP's İmamoglu 53.72% - AKP's Yıldırım 45.37%

 

First unofficial result of Istanbul elections: CHP's İmamoglu 53.72% - AKP's Yıldırım 45.37%

 

Yıldırım congratulates CHP's Imamoglu on lead in preliminary results of Istanbul do-over election.

 

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/first-unofficial-result-of-istanbul-elections-chps-imamoglu-53-72-akps-yildirim-45-37-144413

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Not even close.

 

Erdogan's party suffers blow after Istanbul re-run poll defeat

 

4 hours ago

 

Turkey's ruling AK Party has lost control of Istanbul after a re-run of the city's mayoral election, delivering a stinging blow to President Erdogan.

 

With nearly all ballots counted, main opposition party candidate Ekrem Imamoglu had a lead of 775,000 votes, a huge increase on the margin of 13,000 he achieved in the earlier election.

 

That victory in March was annulled after the AKP alleged irregularities.

 

The result ends 25 years of AKP rule in Istanbul.

 

The AKP's candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, conceded to his opponent.

 

On Twitter, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote: "I congratulate Ekrem Imamoglu who has won the election based on preliminary results."

 

Mr Erdogan had previously said that "whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey". He has ruled the country since 2003 both as prime minister and now president, becoming the most powerful leader since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic.

 

In his victory speech, Mr Imamoglu, of the Republican People's Party (CHP), said the result marked a "new beginning" for both the city and the country. He said his supporters had "fixed democracy".

 

"We are opening up a new page in Istanbul," he said. "On this new page, there will be justice, equality, love."

 

He added that he was willing to work with Mr Erdogan, saying: "Mr President, I am ready to work in harmony with you."

 

With 99% of votes counted, Mr Imamoglu had 54% of the vote and Mr Yildirim 45%.

 

[...]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48739256

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