Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has announced that it will apply for local elections in Istanbul after a nine-day vote due to irregularities in voting and directly impacting the outcome.
We will say that there have been events that have directly affected the outcome of the elections and we are calling for a new ballot in Istanbul, "Ihsan Yavuz, deputy head of the party, told a news conference in Ankara.
This comes hours after the representative of the Turkish Justice and Development Party to the Supreme Committee for Elections Rajab Ozal, in which he said that the Committee rejected the request of the party to recount votes in 31 districts in Istanbul.
Ozal told reporters after a committee meeting that she had decided to call for a recount of 51 ballot boxes in 21 districts in Istanbul, where the main opposition party won a narrow victory.
Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke of "organized crime" in the municipal elections in Istanbul. "In Istanbul, where there are more than 10 million voters, no one can claim to be the winner of a margin of 14-13 thousand votes," he said.
"It's not about violations here and there, because the whole process was a fraud," Erdogan told a news conference before heading to Russia.
"Our party found that organized crimes and activities were systematically committed" during the election, referring to "theft at the ballot box."
On March 31, Turkey witnessed local elections, which resulted in the opposition's progress in Istanbul, according to preliminary unofficial results, while the AKP later requested a recount across the city due to organized irregularities in the counting process.