Mayors of Istanbul and Ankara cry foul over reporting of Turkey’s election results

ISTANBUL — Two of Turkey’s most senior opposition politicians, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, cried foul over the way the state-run Anadolu news agency was reporting results of Turkey’s election on Sunday night, saying it was giving a distortedly high early count to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In its results based on 30 percent of ballots counted at 7.30 p.m., Anadolu reported that Erdoğan was racing ahead with 54 percent of the vote, while his challenger for the presidency Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had only 40 percent. By 11 p.m. the margin had narrowed to 49.9 percent versus 44.3 percent, with 89 percent of the vote counted. Both camps predicted they would win, though a second-round on May 28 started to look possible as neither candidate was on track to secure the more than 50 percent required to claim the presidency outright.

Anadolu’s early numbers are highly contentious because they are widely used as the feed for live election coverage on TV. The opposition argues the state agency is deliberately releasing data from electoral districts in favor of Erdoğan and his AK party first — and holding back numbers on opposition ballots — so that election observers might lose heart and not wait for every last vote to be counted.

For this reason, the opposition is insisting that its election observers must stay in place until all the ballots are counted to prevent any manipulation. The two mayors said Anadolu had used the same strategy in the mayoral elections of 2019, initially saying the votes were on course for big AK party wins, while the opposition eventually took Istanbul and Ankara in late counting.

Adding to the confusion, the Supreme Election Council said at about 10.30 p.m. only 47 percent of votes had been official processed, while Anadolu was giving data based on almost 90 percent of votes. At around the same time, dozens of trucks with blaring horns and AK party flags roared through central Istanbul, seemingly celebrating although Erdoğan was dropping beneath the 50 percent required to win the presidency outright, making a second round on May 28 the most likely option.

İmamoğlu said AK party observers were also contesting the counts at polling stations where the opposition is traditionally strong, and opposition activists urged their members to head to the schools where the votes were held to stop intimidation of their observers. Yunus Başaran, a candidate for the Workers’ Party of Turkey from the southern coastal city of Antalya, said that some ballot boxes had been counted seven times. “This time they’ve found this path,” he said. Journalist Nevșin Mengü tweeted she had information that in the Ankara neighborhood of Çankaya — a traditional opposition bastion — one ballot box had been counted 11 times.

Slamming the public announcement of the results as a “fiction,” opposition leader Kılıçdaroğlu called on his teams to stay vigilant. “We will not sleep tonight,” he said. Erdoğan made the same call: “I ask all of my litigants and colleagues to stay at the ballot boxes, no matter what, until the results are officially finalized.”

The main opposition party, the CHP, said data from its election observers suggested it was winning as results from its strong holds . “We are ahead,” Kılıçdaroğlu tweeted amid the controversy over the vote count.

“I urge citizens not to rely on the [Anadolu agency’s] results. When we look at the ratios, we believe that Kılıçdaroğlu will be comfortably declared as the president of the country, but it’s too early to say when we look at the data,” İmamoğlu told reporters in Istanbul.

Yavaş said: “Let’s keep our morale high.”

Ömer Çelik, spokesperson for the AK party, defended the Anadolu agency and told the mayors that their remarks were “not very becoming.”

“There’s no need to be suspicious,” he said. “They can look at other channels, but our president is winning by a large margin.”

Other political analysts noted early results can favor Erdoğan because small conservative constituencies can report their results relatively quickly.

Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, said the situation mirrored the local election night in 2019 and estimated Kılıçdaroğlu would get more votes toward the end of the vote. 

“I think Kılıçdaroğlu is going to finish the race ahead of Erdoğan, but maybe not get 50 percent,” he told POLITICO.

This article has been updated.