The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and its newly elected mayors will meet today to review the March 31 local election results and draw a road map for the municipalities.
At the three-day event in southern Turkey's Antalya, the party administration will discuss productive municipality strategies and projects pledged by MHP candidates during the election campaign. It will be the MHP's second consultation and assessment meeting after the elections. The party's Central Executive Board, Central Discipline Committee and parliamentarians earlier met in Ankara's Kızılcahamam district between April 13 and 14. They evaluated election results at the meeting, where Bahçeli reportedly emphasized that both the MHP and the People's Alliance were successful in the polls, receiving 52 percent of the votes.
The MHP won in 156 municipalities with a 7.31 percent share of the total votes, while the People's Alliance, formed by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the MHP, won in more than 700 municipalities with 51.6 percent of the votes. The nationalist MHP also made an extraordinary application to the Supreme Election Council (YSK) to rerun the local elections in eastern Turkey's Iğdır.
According to MHP sources, many irregularities have been identified in the Iğdır polls, including fraud and moving the voter registrations of some of the electorate from other cities to Iğdır. Party officials also emphasized that there were numerous cases where more than 50 voters were registered under a single household, raising some serious suspicions. The candidate of the pro-PKK Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Yaşar Akkuş, was elected as Iğdır mayor with 50.1 percent of the votes while the MHP's Yaşar Tezel got 46.6 percent. Meanwhile, the MHP extraordinary appeal to redo the elections in eastern province of Iğdır was rejected by the YSK on late Tuesday.
