The opposition in Türkiye it has not yet surrendered to the results of the May 14 elections. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leader of the opposition Kemal Kilicdaroglu they both stopped below 50% of the preferences, but the outgoing president overtook his opponent by 5 points, overturning the predictions of the last few days. Furthermore, the governing coalition obtained a parliamentary majority, winning well 323 seats out of 600.
For the opposition, however, the votes were not recorded correctly and it is necessary to proceed with the recount of the ballots of 2,269 of the 201,807 polling stations opened in the country last Sunday and another 4,000 for female parliamentarians. The request officially presented by the Republican party Chp al Supreme Election Committee but it may not be accepted. The Turkish authority is closely linked to the outgoing president and has already bowed to Erdogan’s will in the past, even going so far as to cancel the results of the polls of 2019 in Istanbul, causing the vote to be repeated. Certainly the recount of such a small number of seats will not have a significant impact on the final result, but for the CHP “every vote counts”as clearly explained by the head of legal affairs of the party, Muharram Male.
Even the Workers’ Party of Türkiye (Tip) and the pro-Kurdish party of Left Green (Ysp) denounced some alleged irregularities and collected evidence of the discrepancy between the votes registered and those that were actually scrutinized. A prime example is that of section 1240 of Bismilin the southeastern prefecture of Diyarbakir mostly Kurdish. 233 votes for it were recorded here Ysp and 3 votes for the ultra-nationalists of the Mhp, allies of Erdogan, but the official results have been completely reversed: only 1 vote would have gone to the YSP, while the Mhp would have taken as many as 233. The irregularities were not limited only to Bismil. As reported in a press release from Peoples Democratic Party (Hdp), merged for these elections under the initials of the Ysp, the same situation occurred in at least 21 other sections and new irregularities could emerge in the next few hours. The incorrect registration of votes in the Kurdish-majority provinces seems to explain at least in part the success registered by the ultra-nationalist party in a region historically opposed to the president and in particular to a formation particularly hostile towards the Kurds. In the last electoral round, the Mhp had obtained only 3.7% of the preferences in the area, but on 14 May it reached 16.6%, more than doubling its electorate.
For the Kurds, this manipulation of vote registration is not surprising news. Among YSP activists in Diyarbakir, such a scenario was taken for granted on the eve of the vote. For this the party has invited in the southeast several international delegations to monitor and observe the progress of the elections. To try to take measures was also the Chp that through a software ad hoc he should have collected information on the counting of votes independently, so as to verify the veracity of the official data. However, the party’s plan proved unsuccessful. In the first hours of voting, the opposition internally circulated results that were very different from those of the Electoral Council and which gave Kilicadroglu an advantage over the outgoing president. Based on this information, the mayors of Istanbul e you Ankara, Ekrem Imamoglu e Mansur Yavaseven announced the victory of the opposition late at night, increasing the sense of disappointment and defeat of their constituents.
However, the final result was very different from that expected on the basis of the CHP data and it will not change much even in the event of a recount of the contested ballots. This mistake cost dearly to Honorary Adiguzeldeputy chairman of the party and head of the polling station monitoring team, fired a few days after the vote he thus became the scapegoat for a serious communication error.
It is important for the opposition to find a way to independently and correctly verify the votes of May 28, also to restore its credibility after what happened in the first round. But the ‘Table of six‘ he must also manage the issue of fraud well in terms of communication. The elections in Türkiye, as also certified by theOsce, are neither free nor fair, but the level of control over the outcome is not yet so high as to make the expression of this right useless. The opposition must therefore get the message across that, despite the alleged fraud, going to the polls on May 28 is essential for the democratic stability of the country and for putting an end to an increasingly autocratic government.