Erdogan’s AKP Seeking Recount of All Istanbul Votes

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party is seeking a recount of all votes from last week’s local elections in Istanbul, a senior party source said on Sunday, according to Reuters. This comes after a tight-race between the AKP and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), with the latter narrowly winning. The country’s main election board has already ordered a partial recount. The initial results in all 39 districts of the country’s largest city gave a victory to the CHP mayoral candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, although the spread has lessened from the initial 25,000 to just over 16,000, with some 70 percent of the recount completed. The AKP is also challenging the results in the capital Ankara, where the spread was some four percentage points. Defeats in both cities would be blows to Erdogan, who has dominated Turkish politics for more than 16 years and in the 1990s served as Istanbul’s mayor.