Opposition leads nationally: Erdogan regrets the outcome of the Turkish local elections

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (70) has expressed his disappointment with the results of the local elections in Turkey. “We have not achieved the result we hoped for,” Erdogan said in Ankara on Monday evening. According to preliminary results, his party has suffered a huge loss of votes across the country. Erdogan will ‘respect the country’s decision’.

According to state news agency Anadolu, the strongest opposition party, the CHP, has won most of the country’s provinces. Observers called the election results a historically bad outcome for the Islamic Conservative Party. The CHP managed to defend the most populous metropolis Istanbul and the capital Ankara against the AKP by a wide margin, Anadolu reported after 90 percent of the votes had been counted. “We will fairly assess the outcome of the elections in the organs of our party and courageously exercise self-criticism,” Erdogan told his supporters.

Istanbul also remains in the hands of the opposition

Erdogan had made regaining the mayoralty of Istanbul for his AKP a key goal of the local elections. Incumbent Ekrem Imamoglu (52) of the center-left CHP party obtained about 51 percent after almost all votes were counted and was therefore re-elected, Anadolu reported on Monday evening.

Losing the city hall in the economic metropolis of Istanbul in 2019 is considered one of his worst election defeats. Erdogan himself was mayor of the metropolis in the 1990s before coming to power nationally in 2003, first as prime minister and since 2014 as president. Last year, Erdogan was confirmed for a third and, under current law, final mandate.

More than ten months after Erdogan’s re-election, the elections were seen as a sentiment test for the 70-year-old president and his party. (SDA)

Source: Blick