{"id":177738,"date":"2019-06-24T17:55:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T22:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/24\/good-news-from-istanbul\/"},"modified":"2019-06-24T17:55:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T22:55:00","slug":"good-news-from-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/24\/good-news-from-istanbul\/","title":{"rendered":"Good News From Istanbul"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>In March, Turkey&#8217;s Islamist AKP suffered major setbacks.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<p>Most significantly was that, for the first time in over a decade, they narrowly lost the election for Mayor, which did not just a political earthquake, but would eliminate the party&#8217;s control over patronage in Turkey&#8217;s largest city.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;Faced with this treat, Erdo\u011fan petitioned electoral commission to invalidate and re-run the elections, and the commission, being largely a tool of Erdo\u011fan did so.<\/p>\n<p>Well, in the new elections, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2019\/jun\/23\/erdogan-faces-scrutiny-once-more-as-istanbul-goes-back-to-the-polls\">Ekrem \u0130mamo\u011flu defeated the AKP candidate in a land slide<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Turkey\u2019s opposition has won a high-stakes rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election, a serious blow to President <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/recep-tayyip-erdogan\">Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan<\/a> and a landmark victory in a country where many feared democracy was failing. <\/p>\n<p>Shortly after initial results pointing to a landslide win for the opposition coalition candidate, Ekrem \u0130mamo\u011flu, emerged on Sunday evening, the candidate of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Binali Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m, conceded and congratulated his rival. <\/p>\n<p>The repeat election, designed to undo \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s narrow surprise win in the 31 March contest, was an unprecedented test for both Turkey\u2019s fragile democratic institutions and Erdo\u011fan\u2019s political future. <\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The president issued his congratulations to \u0130mamo\u011flu on Twitter after initial results showed that with 99% of ballots counted the People\u2019s Republican party (CHP) candidate had increased his lead in March, of 13,000 votes, to an astonishing 777,000, or 54%. <\/p>\n<p>Crowded parties broke out on Istanbul\u2019s main shopping streets and in liberal neighbourhoods.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I rather hope that this is the beginning the end for Erdo\u011fan, btu I rather imagine that the this is the point where the opposition begins fighting with each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In March, Turkey&#8217;s Islamist AKP suffered major setbacks.&nbsp; Most significantly was that, for the first time in over a decade, they narrowly lost the election for Mayor, which did not just a political earthquake, but would eliminate the party&#8217;s control over patronage in Turkey&#8217;s largest city. &nbsp;Faced with this treat, Erdo\u011fan petitioned electoral commission to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[375,697,374],"class_list":["post-177738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-elections","tag-near-east","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177738"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}