ISTANBUL (AP) — The Latest on disputed mayoral elections in Turkey (all times local):

Turkey's state-run news agency says the country's highest electoral body has ruled for a rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party challenged the legitimacy of the vote an opposition candidate narrowly won.

Anadolu Agency said the Supreme Electoral Board on Monday ruled in favor of Erdogan's conservative and Islamic-based party and annulled the results of the March 31 local election in Istanbul. It was not immediately clear when the election would be repeated.

In a major setback to Erdogan's 16-year rule, the opposition took control of local governments in the capital of Ankara and Istanbul, ending the ruling party's decades-long control of both cities.

Erdogan's party challenged the results in Istanbul, maintaining that alleged irregularities had affected the outcome.

Turkey's highest electoral board is meeting to decide whether an opposition politician is the rightful winner of Istanbul's mayoral race — or whether a new election must be held.

Ekrem Imamoglu narrowly won the race for mayor of Istanbul in Turkey's March 31 local elections, defeating ruling party candidate Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party is however, challenging the result, citing alleged irregularities that it insists impacted the result of the vote. It wants the election in the city to be repeated.

The Supreme Electoral Board began its deliberations on Monday. A decision could come later or in the next few days. </s> Turkey's Supreme Election Council (YSK) has ruled for a rerun of local elections in Istanbul, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party)'s YSK representative Recep Özel said Monday.

The YSK ruled seven against four 4 in favor and annulled the results of the mayoral election in Istanbul. The renewed election will be held on June 23.

The top election body also decided to file a criminal complaint against the chairman and members of the district election council, election managers and other persons responsible for appointing polling staffs unlawfully.

Özel said the decision was based on unsigned results documents from the March 31 election and on some ballot box officials not being civil servants.

"With this decision, our demand for re-election has been vindicated,'' he said.

The YSK also rejected objections to election results in Istanbul's Maltepe and Büyükçekmece districts.

The mayoral certificate of the main opposition Republican People's Party's (CHP) Ekrem Imamoğlu has also been canceled by the council.

The CHP will hold an extraordinary assembly meeting on Tuesday under the chairmanship of the party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently chairing his party's Central Executive Board's (MYK) extraordinary meeting at the party's headquarters.

The decision to re-hold mayoral elections comes in the wake of new pieces of evidence AK Party has uncovered.

Millions of Turkish voters cast their votes nationwide on March 31 in local elections to choose mayors, city council members, and other officials for the next five years.

Elections in Istanbul, where Nation Alliance candidate from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Ekrem İmamoğlu was awarded the certificate of the election with only a 13,729-vote difference were followed by lengthy discussions and objections by parties demanding a do-over election due to irregularities and unlawfulness. After the elections, the AK Party submitted an extraordinary objection to the YSK for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Maltepe Municipality and Büyükçekmece Municipality two weeks ago to cancel and redo the Istanbul municipal election.

The AK Party's extraordinary objection concerned four categories: Irregularities in vote count sheets, serious discrepancies between the number of registered voters and the number of voting ballots, some balloting committee chairmen and members not being government employees as required by law and ineligible voters participating in the polls. According to the AK Party, there were significant discrepancies among tabulated results with wet signatures and stamps, showing the first vote record, the final record and the total number of votes submitted to the YSK. There were also empty or unsigned voting records and irregular registrations of voters.

A probe of irregularities found that dozens of members of balloting committees linked the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), the group behind the 2016 defeated coup in Turkey.

Of 43 committee members allegedly linked to FETÖ, 41 were found to be customers of Bank Asya, a FETÖ-linked bank, two were users of ByLock, the terror group's encrypted messaging app, and two were members of FETÖ-linked labor unions. </s> Turkish election authorities have voided a major election victory for the country's main opposition party, according to Turkish state media. A re-run of the election for the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city, will reportedly be held on June 23.

Ekrem Imamoglu from the opposition Republican People's Party (known as the CHP) narrowly won the mayor's race on March 31.

Imamoglu denounced the Turkish election authority in a speech to supporters on Monday, saying that they had buckled under pressure from the government, as Reuters reported. "They were placed under political pressure from day one."

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, which has held that position of mayor of Istanbul for some 25 years, had file a complaint against the result.

Erdogan had said that there were "clearly irregularities" in the voting, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported from Istanbul. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the country's Supreme Election Council ruled in favor of the ruling Justice and Development Party's complaint by seven votes to four.

"You are free to compete against the [ruling] AKP in an election, but you are not allowed to win," CHP deputy chairman Onursal Adiguzel said in a tweet. "This order, in which the will of the people is trampled on and the laws are ignored, is neither democratic nor legitimate. This is a downright dictatorship!"

The ruling party candidate, Binali Yildirim, has said that he hoped the ruling would mean "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul," as Reuters reported.

The Turkish lira tumbled on Monday afternoon as reports emerged of a re-run.

According to local newspaper Hurriyet, the AKP had alleged that "there were tens of thousands of ineligible voters who cast votes in the elections and that scores of polling station officials were appointed against regulations."

Some observers say the decision erodes democracy in Turkey.

"Until now, it was one man, one vote, from now on it is: vote until the governing party wins," said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Today's decision to reverse the Istanbul mayoral election is the greatest distortion of democratic elections in Turkey since the country's first free and fair polls in 1950."

Erdogan's party also lost the mayor's race in Ankara, the country's capital, in the March country-wide municipal elections where he was actively campaigning for his party's candidates.

Erdogan himself was mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s. As the BBC notes, he has often remarked, "Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey." </s> Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday welcomed an order to re-run the recent Istanbul election, a move the opposition has branded an attack on democracy.

His ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the mayorship of Turkey's biggest city by a narrow margin and has refused to accept defeat.

"We sincerely believe there was organised corruption and irregularities," Erdogan told party members in parliament on Tuesday, saying the re-run was the "best step" for the country.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has condemned Monday's decision by the top election body to re-run the vote as "neither democratic nor legitimate".

Its candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, who has been stripped of the mayorship after winning the March 31 election, was meeting coalition partners on Tuesday to discuss their strategy.

The loss of Istanbul, the country's economic hub, had been a shocking defeat for Erdogan's ruling party.

The AKP and its predecessors have ruled the city for 25 years, and it was especially sensitive for Erdogan, who grew up in the metropolis and rose to power after himself serving as Istanbul mayor.

Imamoglu, a softly-spoken former district mayor, gave a rousing speech to thousands of supporters in Istanbul late Monday, vowing they would emerge even stronger after the re-run on June 23.

"Maybe you are upset but never lose your hope," he said, while thousands more took to the streets of the chic Kadikoy district to protest against the election board.

"This is the collapse of the declining democracy in Turkey. The coming process is condemned to be even worse," said 60-year-old shopkeeper Ali Yamac in central Istanbul.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Tuesday that the decision to annul the election was "not transparent and incomprehensible to us".

The European Union has called for the election body to produce its reasons "without delay".

"Ensuring a free, fair and transparent election process is essential to any democracy and is at the heart of the European Union's relations with Turkey," EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini said in a statement on Monday.

The loss of the mayorship in Istanbul, and a more resounding defeat in the capital Ankara, was a rare setback for Erdogan and his party, reflecting widespread concerns over the deteriorating economy.

The AKP still won the most seats nationwide, but has been damaged by Turkey's first recession in a decade, as well as record-high inflation and a currency that has lost more than 12 percent of its value against the dollar this year alone.

Erdogan's critics say he has eroded rights by cracking down on dissent at home but for his supporters he maintains the image of a strong leader who speaks up for Turkey in the international arena.

The defeated mayoral candidate, former prime minister Binali Yildirim, a close Erdogan ally, said he hoped the re-run would "be beneficial for our city".

The US-based think tank the Soufan Center said the YSK decision marked "serious concerns" for the future of democracy in Turkey.

"Given restrictions on freedom of speech and Turkey's increasingly less independent judiciary, the recent election meddling is a clear signal to the Turkish people, and the world, that Erdogan is willing to pursue absolute power at any cost." </s> ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkey's top election authority voided the Istanbul mayoral election won by an opposition candidate and ordered a do-over, ruling Monday in favor of a request by the president's party to throw out the vote it narrowly lost.

 

 Opposition leaders said the Supreme Electoral Board's decision to invalidate the results from Istanbul's election raises concerns about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grip on power and Turkish democracy in general.

 

 A top aide for Erdogan told The Associated Press that the voiding of the mayoral election in Turkey's biggest city amounts to "a victory for Turkish democracy" by ensuring the results reflect the voters' choice.

 

 Ekrem Imamoglu of the opposition Republican People's Party placed first by a slim margin in the March 31 mayoral election, defeating the ruling party candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Erdogan's conservative and Islamic-based Justice and Development Party then charged that a series of election irregularities made the results illegitimate.

 

 Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency said the Supreme Electoral Board revoked Imamoglu's mandate and called a new election for June 23. As grounds to annul the March 31 results, the board said that some ballot station heads were not civil servants as required by law, the news agency said.

 

 Yildirim, the loser in the election, said he hoped the decision would lead to "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul."

 

 In a statement to the AP, presidential communications director Fahrettin Altun said: "Having held free and fair elections for nearly seven decades, Turkey will complete this process in a transparent, lawful and orderly manner."

 

 Leaders of the Imamoglu's main opposition party held an emergency meeting in the capital of Ankara late Monday.

 

 Addressing thousands of his supporters in Istanbul, Imamoglu accused the electoral board of bowing to pressure and threats from Erdogan's party. He vowed to use "democracy" to win back the "rights" that he said were taken away by force. The crowd called for the electoral board members to resign and accused Erdogan of stealing the vote.

 

 Kati Piri, the European Parliament's rapporteur on Turkey, said on Twitter: "This ends the credibility of democratic transition of power through elections in Turkey."

 

 Police set up barricades around the electoral board's headquarters in Turkey's capital, but there were no immediate signs of major demonstrations. Protesters banged pots and pans in several Istanbul neighborhoods, the opposition Birgun newspaper reported.

 

 Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at the nonprofit Project for Middle East Democracy and a Middle East history scholar at St. Lawrence University in New York, said Monday's ruling "removes the last fig leaf of competitive elections" hiding the erosion of democracy in Turkey.

 

 "Turkey wasn't democratic yesterday and it's not democratic today," Eissenstat said.

 

 He noted that Erdogan's party previously invalidated election results in Turkey's mostly Kurdish-populated regions after a pro-Kurdish party won and replaced elected mayors with government appointees.

 

 "Erdogan cannot afford to lose in the second round. It would a disastrous display of weakness," Eissenstat said.

 

 The local elections held across Turkey on March 31 produced setbacks for the president. His party lost city hall in the capital as well as in Istanbul, ending 25 years of the Justice and Development Party and its Islamist predecessor governing both cities.

 

 The loss of Istanbul, the country's commercial and cultural capital, was particularly hard for Erdogan. He began his political ascent as Istanbul's mayor.

 

 At pre-election rallies, the president had repeatedly told crowds, "Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey" and "Whoever loses Istanbul, loses Turkey."

 

 Istanbul, with its 15 million residents and strategic location straddling Europe and Asia, accounted for 31% of Turkey's GDP of $851 billion in 2017 and draws millions of tourists.

 

 The city government had a budget of $8.8 billion last year. The municipality has awarded lucrative contracts to businesses close to the government over the years and offers huge financial resources and employment opportunities. </s> Binali Yildirim, the AKP candidate for the Istanbul Mayoral re-election, conceded defeat before the declaration of elections results Sunday.

More than 99 percent of the votes have been counted and the results give a big lead for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu gained 54 percent of the votes while Yildirim gained 45 percent of votes.

In the initial March 31 vote, Ekrem İmamoğlu secured a narrow victory over the candidate of President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s largest city, after more than two decades of the ruling party controlling the city.

Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly declared that “whoever wins Istanbul wi ns Turkey.” Istanbul, the country's biggest city, is key for the president because there it was where his political career started by being the mayor of Istanbul between 1994 -1998. Losing Istanbul for the ruling party, which has been in power since 2001, would have a significant impact on the AKP's standing in the country's political sphere.

In March, İmamoğlu secured 48.8 percent of the vote to Yildirim's 48.55 percent. On May 6, Supreme Electoral Board (YSK) decided to cancel and renew the vote. The decision came after the president's party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), filed a complaint to the top election board requesting a re-run on the grounds that some officials supervising the elections were not civil servants as required by law. Since then, most of Turkey’s opposition parties dropped out of the mayoral race to pool votes for İmamoğlu. </s> Turkish election authorities have voided a major election victory for the country's main opposition party, according to Turkish state media. A re-run of the election for the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city, will reportedly be held on June 23.

Ekrem Imamoglu from the opposition Republican People's Party (known as the CHP) narrowly won the mayor's race on March 31.

Imamoglu denounced the Turkish election authority in a speech to supporters on Monday, saying that they had buckled under pressure from the government, as Reuters reported. ">

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, which has held that position of mayor of Istanbul for some 25 years, had file a complaint against the result.

Erdogan had said that there were "clearly irregularities" in the voting, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported from Istanbul. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the country's Supreme Election Council ruled in favor of the ruling Justice and Development Party's complaint by seven votes to four.

"You are free to compete against the [ruling] AKP in an election, but you are not allowed to win," CHP deputy chairman Onursal Adiguzel said in a tweet. "This order, in which the will of the people is trampled on and the laws are ignored, is neither democratic nor legitimate. This is a downright dictatorship!"

The ruling party candidate, Binali Yildirim, has said that he hoped the ruling would mean "beneficial and beautiful results for Istanbul," as Reuters reported.

The Turkish lira tumbled on Monday afternoon as reports emerged of a re-run.

According to local newspaper Hurriyet, the AKP had alleged that "there were tens of thousands of ineligible voters who cast votes in the elections and that scores of polling station officials were appointed against regulations."

Some observers say the decision erodes democracy in Turkey.

"Until now, it was one man, one vote, from now on it is: vote until the governing party wins," said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Today's decision to reverse the Istanbul mayoral election is the greatest distortion of democratic elections in Turkey since the country's first free and fair polls in 1950."

Erdogan's party also lost the mayor's race in Ankara, the country's capital, in the March country-wide municipal elections where he was actively campaigning for his party's candidates.

Erdogan himself was mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s. As the BBC notes, he has often remarked, "Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey." </s> 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 nationwide local vote, his first electoral test since 2018’s sharp currency crisis tipped the Turkish economy into recession.

The Turkish lira weakened after Ozel, the AKP’s representative on the YSK, tweeted the decision, and it was at 6.1075 against the dollar at 17.30 GMT and on track for its worst day in more than a month.

The lira has tumbled about 10% since a week before the initial election. Suspense over the ruling had left investors worried that weeks of additional campaigning would divert funds and attention from addressing economic reforms. </s> ANKARA (Reuters) - Several small Turkish parties have signaled they could back the main opposition candidate for mayor of Istanbul in an election re-run, in protest at electoral authorities’ decision to cancel March’s closely fought municipal election.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, was declared Istanbul mayor in mid-April after weeks of wrangling over the result and a partial recount.

But President Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) repeatedly called for the Istanbul election to be canceled, alleging widespread irregularities.

Imamoglu beat the AKP’s Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister, by about 13,000 votes in a city of 10 million eligible voters; Erdogan had declared that, with such a small margin, “no one has the right to say they won”.

The High Election Board ruled on Monday that the mayoral contest must be rerun on June 23, sending the Turkish lira tumbling against the dollar as investors fretted about political uncertainty and business leaders criticized the move.

The Islamist Saadet, or Felicity Party, whose candidate Necdet Gokcinar attracted more than 100,000 votes, held an emergency meeting on Tuesday.

“I am ready to withdraw in favor of Imamoglu, I will be waiting for the decision of my party,” Gokcinar told the television channel TV5.

The Democratic Left Party (DSP), which won more than 30,000 votes, tweeted that it would “do what is necessary” in the face of “illegalities” by the High Election Board (YSK).

Imamoglu’s victory marked the first time that the AKP or its Islamist predecessors had failed to hold Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city and its commercial hub.

Erdogan himself had served as the city’s mayor in the 1990s and he had campaigned hard ahead of the local vote in March, his first electoral test since last year’s currency crisis tipped the Turkish economy into recession.
After a narrow victory of Turkey's main opposition party CHP against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP in Istanbul's mayoral election last month, Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council annulled the results and ordered a rerun of the election for the mayor of Istanbul.