Month: April 2019

Initial vote counts indicate that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party lost control of multiple major cities in Turkey in local elections Sunday. Erdogan is disputing the results in Ankara and Istanbul, but many analysts say the vote is clearly a setback for the powerful ruler. VOA’s Turkish Service spoke with political analysts about what the results mean, in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service.  Pete Cobus contributed to this report.

LONDON – Ukrainians who live abroad strongly prefer sitting President Petro Poroshenko to other candidates in last weekend’s first-round presidential election, contradicting the choice of voters who reside within the eastern European nation.

According to official tallies of votes cast in Ukraine, comedian-turned-actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy was the preferred choice of 30 percent of the electorate, giving the novice politician a commanding lead over the incumbent Poroshenko, who came in a distant second with roughly 16 percent of the vote.

According to official tallies from Ukraine’s 101 foreign polling stations, however, the majority of Ukraine’s 20 million-strong expat community — less than a half-million of whom are registered to vote — gave Poroshenko 38.9 percent of their estimated 55,000 ballots, leaving Zelenskiy with 26.1 percent, and the difference split among the first round’s other 37 candidates.

Geographic voter preferences

Like their Ukraine-based counterparts, who handed victory to Zelenskiy in 20 of 25 reporting oblasts — the five outliers located the country’s far east and west respectively — voter preference among members of the country’s global diaspora also tended to be geographically clustered.

Poroshenko, for example, was the clear favorite among Ukrainians based the United States, where he garnered 56 percent of the vote. He enjoyed similarly strong showings in Canada (49.9 percent), the United Kingdom (52 percent), France (46 percent) and Germany (42 percent). He also claimed landslides (between 53 and 59 percent) in Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Montenegro, Thailand and Australia.

Zelenskiy had a significantly stronger showing throughout Central and Eastern European countries such as Latvia (43 percent), Belarus (41 percent), Slovakia (40 percent), Hungary (32 percent), along with victories in Armenia, Czech Republic and Georgia. Zelenskiy also captured 38 percent of Poland’s Ukrainian diaspora.

Overall, Poroshenko claimed victory in 53 of the 71 foreign nations where Ukrainian expats are eligible to vote; Zelenskiy triumphed in 16 of them, whereas pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Yuri Boyko won in Estonia and Moldova with 35 and 33 percent respectively.

The breakdown suggests that Western-based Ukrainian voters tended to vote more conservatively than their Central- and Eastern-European counterparts, who appeared more amenable to voting for a newcomer.

Poroshenko, a 53-year-old confectionary magnate before he was elected five years ago, saw his approval ratings slip amid Ukraine’s economic turbulence during the first part of his term. Although real wages have ultimately increased and the economy is growing, ongoing dissatisfaction with cronyism and demands for more effective actions against corruption prompted him to build a re-election campaign that vows to defeat the Russian-backed separatists in the east and to wrest back control of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.

Zelenskiy, 41, who plays a schoolteacher-turned-president infuriated by corruption in a popular television sitcom, made fighting corruption a focus of his actual candidacy, in which he proposed a lifetime ban on holding public office for anyone convicted of graft. He also called for new direct negotiations with Russia on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine, although he has yet to provide a detailed plan of action.

Boyko, 60, the Russian-friendly candidate who performed well in Estonia and Moldova, claimed 11.6 percent of votes cast on Ukrainian soil, where campaign vows to represent Ukraine’s “Russian-speaking population” notched victories in the ethnic-Russian strongholds of Luhansk and Donbass in Ukraine’s war-torn eastern flank.

Ukrainian officials refused to recognize votes cast by Ukrainians living in Russia, citing an inability to guarantee that a country with whom it is at war would conduct fair and transparent polling procedures. Although wire news outlets reported that some Russia-based Ukrainians did cast ballots from authorized polling stations in Finland and Belarus, data recorded in previous years show that Russia-based Ukrainians aren’t particularly engaged in domestic Ukrainian affairs.

This year’s foreign turnout cast 18,000 fewer votes than in 2014, when about 73,000 members of the Ukrainian diaspora helped push Poroshenko into office.

Long treks to the polls

In the United States, some diaspora members drove hundreds of miles to cast their votes.

“We drove about 15 hours yesterday,” Yaroslav Kuznetsov of Tampa, Florida, told VOA Ukrainian, explaining that Ukrainian voting laws required expats to vote at their nearest consulate.

For Kuznetsov, that entailed a trek to Washington, D.C., but one that he didn’t mind making.

“Its very important for the country for Ukraine for our future,” he said.

Ukrainian-American Andriy Nemchenko flew to the nation’s capital from Dallas, Texas.

“It’s most important elections because it is a chance for Ukraine to finally cut off ties with Russia,” he told VOA.

In Ukraine, police officials said they had received more than 2,100 complaints of violations on voting day alone, in addition to hundreds of earlier voting fraud claims, including bribery attempts and removing ballots from polling stations.

But election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe hailed Sunday’s election as competitive and free, even though it criticized procedural violations and said there were indications that state resources were misused in the vote.

Zelenskiy and Poroshenko have advanced to a runoff on April 21.

 
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State Department correspondent Cindy Saine and VOA Russian service reporter Valeria Jegisman contributed to this report

WHITE HOUSE — North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is set to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress Wednesday, ahead of a meeting in Washington of the alliance’s foreign ministers.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invited the NATO leader to speak to members of the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate to show the bipartisan support the 70-year-old trans-Atlantic alliance enjoys among lawmakers in spite of President Donald Trump’s occasional criticisms of the alliance.

As foreign ministers of NATO gather in Washington, foreign policy analysts are emphasizing it is one of the most successful military alliances in history and still relevant, pointing to its ability to adapt in dealing with a resurgent Russia, managing the crisis on the south of NATO’s flank and new, increasing threats such as cybersecurity.

“NATO is adapting and allies are spending more on defense. And I think this administration is understanding more and more how critical NATO is to some of the challenges that it faces, including China,” Mark Simakovsky of the Atlantic Council tells VOA. “So, in many ways, NATO is far from obsolete.”

Trump criticism

Trump’s criticism that NATO members aren’t paying their fair share of defense spending, as well as political upheaval in Europe — including the impending British exit from the European Union — and calls by some to kick Turkey out of NATO, can leave the impression, however, that the defense alliance is fracturing.

“I don’t think that’s the case. The alliance is strong,” Estonian Defense Minister Juri Luik tells VOA, pointing to increased political dialogues and military exercises among NATO’s members, as well as more U.S. military equipment and troops being brought to Europe.

“You’re not giving the money to somebody else. You’re not putting it into a NATO budget somewhere, you’re spending it on yourselves,” says McCain Institute Director Kurt Volker, who formerly served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. “But it is a demonstration of your commitment to your own security, which then gives NATO the confidence that this is a country that we can help defend as well, because they are committed to defense of their own territory.”

Lack of trust

Others agree that defense spending is important, but they say the alliance is fundamentally about the members’ ability to trust each other, and Trump has damaged that trust.

“When an American president questions the value of the alliance, our enemies in Moscow and Beijing are now questioning whether or not NATO would come to the defense of some smaller NATO nations that the president has criticized as maybe not worthy of NATO’s defense,” says Simakovsky, a former Europe/NATO chief of staff in the policy office of the U.S. secretary of defense. “But I don’t think at this summit the administration is going to be announcing any departure of the United States.”

Brooking Institution’s Robert Kagan is expressing concern that Trump’s attitude toward the European Union and expressed hostility toward the defense alliance could bring more chaos to the continent.

“Think of Europe today as an unexploded bomb, its detonator intact and func­tional, its explosives still live. If this is an apt analogy, then Trump is a child with a hammer, gleefully and heedlessly pounding away. What could go wrong?” writes Kagan in an upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

 
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Prime Minister Theresa May and the leader of Britain’s main opposition party were due to meet Wednesday for talks on ending the impasse over the country’s departure from the European Union — a surprise about-face that left pro-Brexit members of May’s Conservative Party howling with outrage.

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said the government was not setting preconditions for the talks with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, but was also not offering a “blank check.”

“There will need to be compromise on all sides,” he said.

The exact timing for the meeting between May and Corbyn wasn’t immediately specified, but it will probably take place Wednesday afternoon.

After failing repeatedly to win Parliament’s backing for her Brexit blueprint, May dramatically changed gear Tuesday, saying she would seek to delay Brexit and hold talks with the opposition to seek a compromise.

May said the country needs “national unity to deliver the national interest.”

That points Britain toward a softer Brexit than the one May has championed since the June 2016 decision to leave the EU. Labour wants the U.K. to remain in a customs union with the bloc to ensure frictionless trade. May has always ruled that out, saying it would limit Britain’s ability to forge an independent trade policy.

But May’s Brexit deal with the EU has been rejected three times by Parliament.

Barclay said the “remorseless logic” of Parliament’s failure to back the prime minister’s deal was that the country was heading toward a softer form of Brexit.

“The alternative to that is no Brexit at all and I think that would be very damaging from a democracy point of view,” he told Parliament’s Brexit committee.

May’s government and the Conservative Party are split between those who want to keep close economic ties with the EU, and Brexiteers who say Britain must make a clean break in order to take control of its laws and trade policy.

The Brexit-backers condemned May’s shift. Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Brexit “is becoming soft to the point of disintegration.”

Junior Wales Minister Nigel Adams quit his post, sending the prime minister a letter criticizing her for seeking a deal with “a Marxist who has never once in his political life out British interests first” — a reference to the left-wing Corbyn.

“It is clear we will now end up in the customs union. That is not the Brexit my constituents were promised,” Adams wrote.

May’s change of plan came just days before Britain faced a disruptive no-deal departure from the EU. That would mean tariffs and other barriers to trade between Britain and the bloc, with the potential for border gridlock and shortages of goods.

The leaders of the EU’s 27 remaining countries have given the U.K. until April 12 to leave the bloc or to come up with a new plan, after British lawmakers three times rejected an agreement struck between the bloc and May late last year.

The House of Commons has also failed to find a majority for any alternative plan in two days of voting on multiple options.

European Council President Donald Tusk gave a cautious welcome to May’s change of course.

“Even if, after today, we don’t know what the end result will be, let us be patient,” he tweeted — a suggestion the EU would wait for Britain to present a clear plan.

The European Parliament’s Brexit chief, Guy Verhofstadt, tweeted that May’s move toward compromise was “better late than never.”

Labour’s business spokeswoman, Rebecca Long-Bailey, said May’s offer was long overdue, but that the opposition would enter talks with an open mind.

“We’re not setting any red lines for these discussions with the prime minister,” she said.
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U.S. lawmakers of both parties on Tuesday resolutely endorsed the Trump administration’s decision to halt delivery of F-35 fighter equipment to Turkey over Ankara’s decision to purchase a Russian surface-to-air missile system — a possible first step to blocking Turkey from acquiring the stealth jet altogether.

“If Turkey goes through with the Russian system, there is no way in the world that we can justify training them [on the F-35] and going through with our commitment on the [delivery of] the two F-35s,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said.

“The two can’t exist [together], the F-35 and the Russian system,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who also serves on the panel. “We’re not going to allow that to happen.”

Both senators spoke with VOA moments before the committee heard from President Donald Trump’s nominee to become NATO Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters.

“I concur with this committee’s belief that the S-400 [Russian missile system] and the F-35 are not compatible, and if Turkey proceeds down a path to procure and operate the S-400, they should not get the F-35,” Wolters said.

Danger to F-35s

Last week, Turkey’s foreign minister reaffirmed his country’s commitment to a deal with Moscow to buy the S-400, a system Washington believes could imperil the F-35, an advanced radar-eluding fighter jet. U.S. officials have warned that Turkey’s possession of both U.S. and Russian systems ultimately could help Moscow find ways to detect the F-35 and gain access to advanced American military technology.

“We cannot allow the technology of the F-35 to get into the hands of the Russians and our enemies,” New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen told VOA.

Shaheen and three other senators have introduced legislation prohibiting the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the Trump administration certifies that Ankara will not accept delivery of the Russian air-defense system.

“It would be better if we were able to simply have them eliminate the S-400,” South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said of Turkey’s planned purchase.

Complicating the issue is Turkey’s role in the supply chain for assembling the F-35, which is made by U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin.

“Component parts of the F-35 are produced in Turkey, so we have to examine all the options,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said. “We need to really maximize our effort to achieve Plan A, which is that they don’t purchase the Russian system.”

‘Mixed issues’ with Turkey

Inhofe suggested Turkey’s role in F-35 production can be replaced.

“One time, they [Lockheed Martin] said, ‘We can’t make them without Turkey.’ We found that was not true,” the chairman said.

The Pentagon confirmed Inhofe’s assertion.

“The DoD [Department of Defense] has initiated steps necessary to ensure prudent program planning and resiliency of the F-35 supply chain,” acting Chief Pentagon spokesperson Charles Summers said. “Secondary sources of supply for Turkish-produced parts are now in development.”

The disagreement over military systems is one of several points of tension that have arisen in recent years between Washington and Ankara.

“They’re an ally, they’re a NATO ally, but we’ve got a lot of mixed issues with them, from our support for the Kurds in northern Syria, who have been an effective fighting force against ISIS, to this issue [of military acquisitions],” Kaine told VOA.

The senator added, “But then again, we would not have been able to successfully prosecute the war against ISIS without using the Incirlik [Turkish military] base in Adana. So they have been a supportive ally in many ways.”

Asked how he would characterize Turkey as a U.S. ally, Manchin said, “Cautiously, very cautiously. I put them in the same category as I would Pakistan [a major non-NATO U.S. ally].”

VOA’s Carla Babb contributed to this report from the Pentagon.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May says she will seek a further delay to the country’s exit from the European Union to allow more time for parliament to pass a deal on the terms of its withdrawal.

To date, British lawmakers have three times rejected the deal that May’s negotiators agreed to after two years of talks with the EU.

“So we will need a further extension of Article 50, one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. And we need to be clear what such an extension is for, to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way,” May said Tuesday. “Today I am taking action to break the logjam.”

She said she is willing meet with Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labor Party, to try to agree on a Brexit plan that lawmakers could agree to.

Britain was originally due to leave the bloc by March 29, but May got approval from the EU for a short extension to give her government more time to find a solution parliament could support.

While the process dragged on, parliament sought its own path forward, but in a series of votes Monday lawmakers struck down four possible paths forward.  The closest that came to passing was a proposal to have Britain withdraw from the EU, but remain in a customs union.

The latest deadline set by the European Union is April 12.  If British leaders have still not agreed to a plan, then European Union chief negotiator Michel Barnier says the only choices at that point will be for the country to exit with no deal or try to get the other EU members to agree to a longer extension.

 
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party on Tuesday appealed election results in Istanbul and Ankara, claiming irregularities in the voting cost them mayorships in both cities.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority of votes throughout Turkey in Sunday’s local elections, but trailed in Istanbul, the country’s economic hub, and Ankara, the capital. If the initial outcomes hold, it would be a political setback for the Turkish leader, who campaigned extensively for his party’s candidates.

AKP’s Istanbul chief, Bayram Senocak, said the party had filed objections about the voting in all 39 districts in the city. “We have identified irregularities and falsifications,” he said.

Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu claimed victory in the mayor’s race in Istanbul by 28,000 votes over AKP’s Binali Yildirim, a former Turkish premier.

Imamoglu told reporters, “Had the other party won, I would have said ‘Congratulations, Mr. Binali Yildirim,’ which I do not say because I am the one who won. They are behaving like a kid who has been deprived of his toy.”

In Ankara, opposition CHP mayoral candidate Mansur Yavas was ahead of AKP’s Mehmet Ozhaseki by nearly four percentage points, according to the state news agency Anadolu, but the AKP said it was contesting the results in 25 districts.

Electoral authorities have two days to decide whether the claims of vote irregularities have any merit.

 
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The United States and its allies are stepping up cooperation in response to Russian aggression, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday while playing down differences among members as the military alliance marks its 70th anniversary.

Foreign ministers from NATO countries are meeting in Washington this week for the occasion, determined to show a united front in the midst of a long military stalemate in Afghanistan and tensions with Russia returned to Cold War-era levels.

But as NATO deploys thousands of troops and equipment to deter Russia and seeks solutions to fast-evolving new threats such as cyberattacks and hybrid warfare, its biggest challenge arguably lies within. Damaging infighting over defense spending and authoritarian tendencies exhibited by some allies undermine NATO’s values, according to experts.

“The strength of NATO is that despite these differences, we have always been able to unite around our core tasks. That is, to protect and defend each other,” NATO chief Stoltenberg said in Brussels before the trip.

Stoltenberg has talks with U.S. President Donald Trump planned for Tuesday. He is scheduled to address Congress on Wednesday.

A big source of the internal strain is Trump’s recurrent demand that countries devote an amount equal to at least 2 percent of GDP to defense spending — though that metric takes no account of how well the money is spent — as well as the U.S. president’s reluctance to criticize strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“NATO’s single greatest challenge is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history,” two former U.S. envoys to NATO, Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute, wrote in a report for the alliance anniversary.

Trump, they said, is seen by allies as NATO’s “most urgent, and often most difficult, problem.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. He was asked if he was familiar with the report by Burns and Lute.

Pompeo said he hadn’t read the report but he had known Lute since he was a young military office and had “great respect for him.” But on the subject of Trump and NATO, Lute was “just simply wrong,” Pompeo said.

“If the conclusion he drew that President Trump is the biggest impediment to NATO, he’s just simply wrong,” he added. “We have worked diligently to make NATO stronger. I am convinced that we have done so.”

Trump made a memorable impression on leaders from Canada and European nations during his first NATO summit in May 2017. During a speech outside NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, he publicly humiliated them. Trump also cast doubt on whether they could count on Washington to fulfill NATO’s collective defense clause.

The speech was delivered by a memorial made from a twisted piece of the World Trade Center towers felled by al-Qaida’s airliner attacks on Sept. 11, 2011. Since the founding Washington Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, NATO has only once activated the clause stating that an attack on one member is an attack on them all, after the 9/11 attacks.

Trump also delayed a summit last year with fresh demands on burden sharing. That time, at least, his dressing down about the U.S. spending more on defense than the other NATO members combined happened behind closed doors.

Trump’s routine tirades have fueled suspicion his aim mostly is to drum up business for the U.S. defense industry.

But the attitude of Trump — who walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate change agreement his allies in Europe value while making tariff threats against them — also is similar to authoritarian or populist streaks showing up in NATO members Turkey, Hungary, Italy and Poland.

“The political and trans-Atlantic unity that underpins NATO has been weakened. Only bad guys benefit from trans-Atlantic division and a U.S. retreat from its global leadership role,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Stoltenberg’s predecessor as NATO’s top civilian official, said in an email exchange with The Associated Press.

“We see the consequences of U.S. retreat, with autocrats and dictators filling the vacuum,” he added,

Burns and Lute say this retreat from democracy, individual freedoms and the rule of law is “a potentially cancerous threat.”

Still, NATO has survived formidable challenges over the decades, including the Cuban missile crisis and the missile race in Europe. It’s also remained intact after internal divisions over the Suez Canal, the Iraq war, and France’s departure from the alliance’s command structure. Officials say they are confident NATO will endure now, too.

The White House said last month in a statement about Stoltenberg’s talks with Trump on Tuesday that the two would “discuss the unprecedented success of NATO, including the recent increased commitments on burden-sharing among European allies and ways to address the current, evolving challenges facing the alliance.”

Trump is not scheduled to appear at the upcoming talks of NATO foreign ministers, but he is expected to attend a leaders’ summit in London in mid-December.

“I hope we will not see a repeat of President Trump’s antics in Brussels last year. It’s time for the world’s democracies to show their unity,” Rasmussen said.
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After months of warnings, the United States has stopped delivery of F-35 fighter jet parts to Turkey in retaliation for Ankara’s decision to move ahead with the purchase of a Russian surface-to-air missile system, the Pentagon said Monday.

Top U.S. government leaders have repeatedly threatened to shut down Turkey’s plan to buy the F-35 advanced fighter aircraft if Turkey didn’t abandon efforts to buy the S-400 Russian system. 

Halting the delivery of parts and manuals needed to prepare for the aircraft’s planned delivery this summer is the first step toward ending the actual aircraft sale.

“The United States has been clear that Turkey’s acquisition of the S-400 is unacceptable,” said acting Pentagon spokesman Charles Summers Jr. “Until they forgo delivery of the S-400, the United States has suspended deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey’s F-35 operational capability. Should Turkey procure the S-400, their continued participation in the F-35 program is at risk.”

The U.S. move comes just days after Turkey’s foreign minister said his country was committed to the deal to buy the Russian system and was discussing delivery dates.

American defense and military leaders have said that unless Turkey, a NATO ally, reconsidered its purchase of the S-400, it would forfeit other future American military aircraft and systems. The U.S. and other NATO allies have repeatedly complained about the purchase, saying it is not compatible with other allied systems and would represent a threat to the F-35.

During a Capitol Hill hearing last month, U.S. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the top NATO general, said his best military advice would be that the U.S. not work with an ally that’s acquiring Russian systems that can threaten one of the American military’s most advanced capabilities. Officials have also expressed concerns that Turkey’s acquisition of both U.S. and Russian systems could give Moscow access to sophisticated American technology and allow it to find ways to counter the F-35.

“I’m pleased to see that the Pentagon is heeding our calls to stop the transfer of F-35 related equipment to Turkey,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “Turkey operating both the S-400 missile and the F-35 is a non-starter. It puts our national security at risk and undermines our NATO allies.”

The U.S. had agreed to sell 100 of its latest, fifth-generation F-35 fighters to Turkey, initially planning to deliver the two aircraft to Turkey in June.

Summers said that although Washington continues to talk with Turkey about the matter, the Pentagon has begun taking necessary steps to find other sources of supply for the Turkish-produced parts of the F-35. The department, he said, is taking prudent steps to protect the supply chain and the shared investments in the aircraft technology.

Pentagon leaders have warned that ending Turkey’s participation in production would likely force other allies to take on that role and could delay aircraft delivery.

U.S. leaders have pressed Turkey to buy an American-made air defense battery, and in December the State Department approved the sale of a $3.5 billion U.S. Patriot system to Ankara.

Turkey’s foreign minister said Friday his country was committed to buying the Russian missile defense system. Speaking at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in the Mediterranean coastal city of Antalya, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu ruled out the possibility of Turkey selling the S-400s to another country as suggested by some analysts as a compromise solution.

“As a principle, it is contrary to international laws for a third country to oppose an agreement between two countries,” Cavusoglu said. “We are committed to this agreement. There can be no such thing as selling to a third country. We are buying them for our own needs.”

Cavusoglu also insisted Turkey had met all of its obligations concerning the F-35 program.

 
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suffered his worst electoral setback, with his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, losing control of the capital, Ankara, and seemingly set to lose Istanbul following this past Sunday’s local elections.

In Istanbul, posters that were put up around the city early Monday celebrated the victory of AKP mayoral candidate Binali Yildirim; however, the candidate of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Ekrem Imamoglu, has the votes and is claiming the win in Istanbul, albeit with a thin margin of victory over Yildirim.

Sadi Guven, the head of Turkey’s High Electoral Board (YSK), which administers the country’s elections, confirmed Imamoglu had secured around 25,000 votes more than Yildirim, out of 9 million ballots cast.

Opposition parties have criticized Guven, an Erdogan appointee, for being too close to the AKP in previous voting controversies.

Yildirim is looking to Guven to overturn the latest result.

“Let me tell you what will happen next. Whoever is given the mandate by the YSK will take over as mayor,” he said.

Yildirim says an excessive number of invalidated votes denied him victory, a charge dismissed by Imamoglu.

Istanbul’s Uskudar district is home to Erdogan and a stronghold of his AKP. Yildirim’s stance has support there. “Istanbul is won by Yildirim. With God’s will, he will be confirmed,” said an AKP supporter who declined to be named.

Other Yildirim supporters, however, said they were ready to admit defeat.

“They (AKP) are defeated because they couldn’t hit their targets with some of their programs,” said a logistics worker serving the security forces. “They (AKP) also lost because of the economic and political situation as well as unemployment,” said the person, who wished to remain anonymous.

New future

Turkey is in the grip of a recession, with unemployment approaching record numbers and inflation at nearly 20 percent. Food prices are rising by close to 30 percent.

The district neighboring Uskudar is Kadikoy, an electoral stronghold of the opposition CHP. Party banners there are celebrating the party’s victory. Many people are already looking to a new future.

“Elections took place with much excitement, and I think the result was unexpected for the people,” said Emir, an airline worker.

“It is an election that will be talked about by people for a long time to come,” he added. “AKP won the polls for many years, but I think now a change has happened and I believe this change will be good for people.”

Analysts say Istanbul traditionally provides the impetus for political change in Turkey.

“Results of Istanbul’s local elections are so important for Turkish politics because Istanbul is the greatest city, traditionally politically, culturally and economically, of course,” said communications professor Baris Doster of Istanbul’s Marmara University.

“Istanbul changes the face of Turkish politics,” Doster said.

Importance of Istanbul

In 1994, Erdogan rose from political obscurity to dominate Turkish politics after narrowly winning the Istanbul mayorship in a surprise victory as a member of a then-fringe Islamist party.

Doster says the opposition will likely seek to use Istanbul as a springboard to power.

“Istanbul changing hands with elections after a quarter of a century will bring excitement to the opposition and will have, from now on, a lasting impact in Turkish political life,” he said.

Given the importance of Istanbul, the AKP appears not ready to give up control of the city, with party officials claiming voting irregularities.

In AKP strongholds like Uskudar, however, some are calling for reconciliation rather than confrontation.

“We are all brothers; this is not a war, whether its vote is for the prime minister or the municipal mayor,” said one retiree. “I wish for our country just to live peacefully under one flag.”

Analysts say the local elections were among the most politically divisive, with Erdogan claiming the country’s future was at stake; however, in an address to supporters Sunday night, he took a more conciliatory approach by avoiding verbal attacks on the opposition and stressing the importance of putting country before party.

Some analysts interpreted the comments as a code for accepting defeat in Ankara and Istanbul. The AKP, however, is continuing to contest both results. They say that how the disputed Istanbul vote is resolved will be key to determining whether the political divide deepens.
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