​Istanbul elections: Final words

TURKEY - In Brief 20 Jun 2019 by Atilla Yesilada

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With 4 days left to go to the crucial Istanbul municipal re-elections, I wanted to gather all the poll evidence and answer FAQs.There are other issues on the horizon, such as Bloomberg news of Washington policy establishment mulling what type of S-400 sanctions to levy on Turkey, and TRNC declaring it may open no-man’s zone Varosha to tourism, as a counter-salvo to rising pressure on the Turkish side to cease drilling in East Med. Yet, in my world the answer to these problems lie in how President Erdogan will react to a possible loss in Istanbul elections. Yesterday, presumably the most impartial and accurate election forecaster of Turkey KONDA released its poll, showing Imamoglu ca 10 points ahead, with undecideds distributed between candidates. There are at least two polls, by MAK Consulting and Istanbul Economic Researchconcluding that Imamoglu also bested Yildirim in the live TV debate, thus exhausting one of the major AKP hopes of a last minute surge.Of course, polls can be wrong, but in my 20 years of poll watching I’ve never seen such a consensus about one candidate. I fully expect Imamoglu to win Sunday night by an indisputable margin. This of course, brings the first FAQ to mind:Will AKP attempt to cheat? The opposition media is not making such a claim, touting instead the unjust smear campaign against their candidate. As I’ve said earlier, AKP-MHP may attempt fraud, but in Istanbul with thousands of official and voluntary poll monitors, I’ll find out before polls close.Another interesting and almost unanimous finding in polls is that AKP voters are skeptical about High Election Council verdict to overturn 31 March results, meaning they don’t like cheating. Fo...