When I heard that the city elections for Istanbul, Turkey, had resulted in a narrow victory for the opposition’s candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, but then the national government had nullified the elections on some obscure grounds or another, I got that bad feeling in my gut. Surely Erdogan’s national government wouldn’t let the rascally opposition gain a lick of power, much less the position of mayor of the largest city, would they?
Sometimes the gut is wrong:
The opposition’s stunning landslide victory in yesterday’s controversial redo of the Istanbul municipal polls has reignited hopes that Turkey’s democracy, which seemed to be in its death throes, has some fight in it still.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the once obscure former Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Beylikduzu, an ugly urban sprawl on the edge of Istanbul, defeated his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) rival Binali Yildirim by a whopping 800,000 votes compared with the measly 13,000 ballots in the first run. The result is widely seen as the biggest setback faced by the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who pressured electoral authorities to invalidate the March 31 results in Istanbul in the hope of winning this time.
Western diplomats cynically intoned that Erdogan would do so, cheating his way to victory if need be. But few counted on the apocalypse that was in store. Cheating was apparently not an option: AKP strongholds like Fatih and Uskudar, where Erdogan maintains his private residence, fell to the opposition, a resounding signal that his oversize sense of entitlement coupled with a poorly managed and polarizing campaign had backfired spectacularly. Rising inflation and joblessness are however among the AKP’s biggest woes. [AL-Monitor]
Overconfidence and the belief that they deserved it appears to have been the undoing of the ruling party. That the AKP is basically a religious party – of the Muslims, but it doesn’t really matter – suggests they probably felt they had the imprimatur of their deity and thus they couldn’t lose.
It’s a common failing. We’ve seen that with the Republicans.
I don’t have much more to add, except don’t despair, there’s always a chance your opponents will become overconfident when they are ascendant – and then they become descendant.
