On April 9, Devlet Bahçeli – leader of Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) –declared that he did not recognize Ankara’s newly elected mayor Mansur Yavaş, the candidate supported by the National Alliance (NA) between the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and İYİ Parti (İP) as his mayor. This, Bahçeli asserted, is because “even though Yavaş received the mandate, he still did not win in good conscience (kamu vicdanı).”
In the same statement, Bahçeli also raised the prospect of re-running the İstanbul elections. Shortly after, Süleyman Soylu – Turkey’s hawkish Minister of Interior Affairs, who had until this point kept a noticeably low profile since the elections on March 31 – appeared in front of the cameras to second Bahçeli’s take on the need for an election repeat in İstanbul due to suspicions of ballot fraud. Soylu claimed that this “would benefit democracy because it would clear the elected mayors of any impropriety.”
Later that day, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself also joined Bahçeli and Soylu, and told journalists shortly before taking off for his meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin that “irregularities [in İstanbul] are not random but systematic and organized.”
