Türkiye’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) has ruled to repeat local elections in four cities as it continues deliberating objections to results of the March 31 polls.
Mayoral elections will be held again on June 2 in central Kayseri’s Pınarbaşı district, southeastern Şanlıurfa's Hilvan district, a town in northwestern Edirne and a district in central Sivas, YSK chief Ahmet Yener told reporters in Ankara on Thursday.
He said the council has accepted the objections of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), its nationalist ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and Parliament’s third-largest Green Left Party (YSP), informally known as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party).
Nearly two weeks after the local elections in Türkiye, the official results have still not been finalized due to a large number of objections.
The official period for contesting the election results ended on Wednesday and the extra period will end this Sunday as the YSK continues evaluating some 40 more requests for annulment, recount or repeat of the municipal elections.
The council earlier this week rejected the CHP’s demand to recount votes and redo elections in southern Hatay province and granted AK Party candidate Mehmet Öntürk his certificate of mayor, who won with a narrow margin against CHP’s Lütfü Savaş, by some 2,569 votes.
The CHP had accused the province of accepting votes from citizens killed in the Feb. 6 earthquakes that claimed over 53,000 lives in the country’s southeast last year. Hatay was one of the provinces worst affected by the disaster. Both the province’s CHP government and the central government were heavily criticized following the earthquakes.
Speaking to locals in Hatay via a call after the decision, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan assured his AK Party would step up its efforts and services for Hatay in the upcoming period.
“Above all, we will strive to overcome Hatay’s problems due to the unfortunate earthquake as soon as possible. After the bayram, I hope that I and my delegation will visit Hatay,” he said, meaning the Eid al-Fitr holiday.
The CHP has since criticized the YSK as “unlawful” and announced it had formed a “special group” for Hatay consisting of urban planners, lawyers and auditors that would start its work after the holidays.
According to unofficial results from the YSK, the CHP won an election for the first time in four decades on March 31, taking 35 mayoral seats, including 14 metropolitan municipalities like Istanbul and Ankara, while the AK Party won 24 cities, the YSP took 10, the MHP eight, the New Welfare Party (YRP) two, and the Great Union Party (BBP) and the Good Party (IP) one each.
With all ballot boxes opened across the country, the CHP led with 37.76% of votes, followed by the AK Party with 35.48%. Candidates from a total of 34 political parties competed in the elections, with over 206,000 polling stations set up across the country.
Turnout was particularly low for the local vote, down by almost 5 million people to 78.1% from 84.7% in 2019 and 86.9% in the 2023 elections, meaning 22 out of every 100 voters didn’t go to polls.
Preliminary research from the parties so far has shown “economic conditions, fatigue from back-to-back elections and dissatisfaction with mayoral candidates” were the main causes of voter abstention.
