Turkey’s election board orders rerun of Istanbul poll
Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party says the ruling ‘overrules the will of the people’
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 natio...
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