by Burak Bekdil
• June 24, 2019 at 3:00 am
The invincible Erdoğan took a great risk: a second loss for the man who thinks "whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey" would mean just more than just an embarrassing mayoral loss. Comparatively speaking, the difference in votes between Imamoğlu and Erdoğan's candidate, Yıldırım, widened within less than two months from 13,000 to nearly 800,000.
"It appears that losing Istanbul entails too many risks for the AKP for the matter to be left to its own resources. Many are convinced that if the AKP were to lose Istanbul to the opposition, after having held it – with its precursor – for 25 years, a hornet's nest of vested interests, corruption, and abuse of power would be revealed." -- Semih Idiz, a columnist for Sigma Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank.
The more the masses start feeling the economic pressure, the more Erdoğan's popularity will sink.
Crowds celebrating Ekrem Imamoglu's second victory. Who would have guessed that what a 13-year-old opposition youth's shout at Imamoğlu's election bus would become the slogan of hope for tens of millions of Turks: Erkem! Everything is coming up roses..." Photo: Getty Images.
A political Islamist party that comes to power by popular vote would never leave power by popular vote. That suggestion is overwhelmingly accurate. But not always. Any Turks younger than 18 has never seen an election defeat for (former prime minister) President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. On June 23 a little-known small district mayor won Istanbul for the first time since Islamists first won Istanbul's mayorship in 1994 – a good quarter of a century.
In fact, that was the second time Ekrem Imamoğlu won Istanbul in less than two months. "Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey," has been Erdoğan's dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey's biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey's 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP).
The headline on the Istanbul election, on May 27, was "Erdoğan's Istanbul Nightmare."
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