Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party: Erdogan’s mandate should be abolished if the Istanbul municipal elections are canceled

Turkey’s main opposition party said on Wednesday it had officially asked to cancel the mandate of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan because the same irregularities his AK Party claims happened in the Istanbul municipal elections on March 31 were marred by last year’s general election.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP) also said that the votes cast for Istanbul officials and councils, delivered in the same envelopes as the municipal elections, should be canceled if the municipal elections were re-elected.

The Justice and Development Party won a majority in the councils, according to Reuters.

After weeks of appeals by Justice and Development (AKP) and its allies in the MHM, the election commission on Monday re-elected the Istanbul municipal elections, which Ekrem Imamoglu won by a narrow margin.

It was the first time in 25 years that justice and development or Islamist parties have failed to control Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, with a budget of around $ 4 billion. Erdogan began his political career as mayor of the city.

The Supreme Electoral Commission, which also abolished the mandate of Imamoglu, ruled in its ruling on irregularities in the appointment of polling station officials.

Erdogan’s party said the fact that the appointment of individuals who are not government employees to oversee polling stations amounts to organized crime.

However, the Commission left the results of neighborhood chiefs, municipal councils and local officials unchanged, a decision the CHP said was worthless because all four ballots were cast in the same envelopes and counted by the same committee officials.

Muharrem Erkek the Secretary-General and the vice president of the Republican People’s Party, told reporters:

“If you cancel the mandate of Ekrem Imamoglu, then you must also cancel President Erdogan’s mandate because the same laws, the same regulations, the same requests, the same polling stations and the same conditions were present in both polls”.

“Why don’t you cancel the results from the same envelopes?” He asked.

According to a video posted on the Justice and Development Account on Twitter, the upper seat of the elections didn’t rule out the need to return all the elections in Istanbul because the number of “suspicious” votes they had set would not affect the outcome of district council elections.