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Monkey Cage

Electoral irregularities benefited Turkey’s ruling party, not the opposition

Here’s what it means for next month’s election rerun in İstanbul.

Analysis by
May 10, 2019 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Ekrem İmamoğlu of the main opposition Republican People's Party, who was elected mayor after the March 31 elections, addresses his supporters in Istanbul on Monday after the High Election Board decided to rerun the mayoral election. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

On Monday, Turkey’s Higher Electoral Commission (YSK) finally made its long-anticipated decision about the Istanbul metropolitan mayoral election of March 31. The YSK accepted the electoral irregularity claims made by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and required that the election be rerun on June 23.

The decision to rerun the election has been widely criticized as the latest step of backsliding in Turkish democracy. Many analysts believe that the decision has less to do with electoral irregularities than with Erdogan’s refusal to accept the ruling party’s loss of the critical Istanbul municipality.