Istanbul voters turn out for mayoral election rerun as Erdogan bids to reverse defeat in Turkey's largest city

Voters in Istanbul return to the polls for the second time in three months on Sunday after the ruling party forced a redo of the mayoral election, hoping to reverse a stinging defeat and recapture Turkey’s largest city.

The constant campaigning has exhausted some voters, especially those who back the opposition and are unconvinced Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s formidable president, will concede should his party lose again.

“I’m tired of endless elections, and I’m afraid we will keep having them until the governing party wins,” said Dilber, 33, a security guard who declined to give her surname. “It is difficult to defend my faith in the ballot box.”

Nearly one out of 10 Istanbul voters said they were undecided or didn’t plan to show up, according to pollsters at Konda Research this week. Sunday’s election is the eighth vote in five years.

Though his name isn’t on the ballot, Mr Erdogan has injected himself into the race to help his party’s trailing candidate, accusing the opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu this week of treachery and suggesting he could block his path if he wins again.

Mr Erdogan held the powerful job of Istanbul mayor himself before becoming prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014. He is Turkey’s most popular politician but his critics blame him for an erosion of democracy by jailing tens of thousands of his enemies, silencing a once-garrulous press and exerting control over the judiciary and other institutions.

As for Mr Imamoglu, 49, few were familiar with the former mayor of an outlying suburb for the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) before his upset victory on March 31. He beat the conservative Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) Binali Yildirim, 63, by fewer than 14,000 votes in a city with 10 million voters.

This time, most opinion polls show Mr Imamoglu ahead by about two percentage points, and he credits the rise to a sense of grievance over his ouster after just 18 days in office, when electoral officials decided that irregular appointment of some polling station officials may have skewed the result.

Mr Imamoglu has energised the CHP, banished from power since the 1970s, and attracted non-traditional voters hurt by an economic downturn. He has also appealed to many with a promise to bridge the country’s divides after the tumult of recent years, including renewed violence with Kurdish militants, a failed military coup against Mr Erdogan in 2016 and the crackdown that is still ongoing - 151 people including senior military officers were given life sentences over the uprising this week.

The main Kurdish party is campaigning for Mr Imamoglu, and its former chairman, Selahattin Demirtas, this week urged his estimated 1 million supporters to back the CHP candidate in a tweet from his prison cell, where he has been held since 2016 on terror charges stemming from his political speeches.

Pro-government media then released a statement from another jailed Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in which he purportedly said his party should remain neutral. Mr Ocalan, whom many Kurds regard as a hero but most Turks brand a terrorist, is 20 years into a life sentence for leading an armed insurgency against the state.

Mr Erdogan’s intervention in the race comes at a time when he must steady the economy and confront foreign policy challenges, including a looming showdown with the United States over the purchase of Russian arms that Washington says will jeopardise NATO security.

But his focus on a municipal election instead reveals how critical Istanbul, accounting for a third of Turkey’s economy, is to his political movement, which has controlled the city - and its lucrative contracts - for a quarter century.

During his brief stint at city hall, Mr Imamoglu said he discovered the AKP-run municipality had squandered public money on cars, consultants and charities run by members of Mr Erdogan’s inner circle, striking a nerve among voters grappling with 20 percent inflation and unemployment of 14 percent.

“Our country, our city and our people’s time are being wasted because a handful of people have disregarded democracy. I believe this injustice and the profligacy that has deprived 16 million [residents] of service will come to end” with the election, Mr Imamoglu told reporters this month.

For his part, Mr Erdogan points to a tripling in the size of the Turkish economy - despite the current recession - that has improved millions of lives under his rule. In recent days, he has said Mr Imamoglu sided with an outlawed Muslim sect blamed for the abortive coup and may face prosecution for allegedly insulting a provincial official. “I won’t cede Istanbul to liars like this,” Mr Erdogan said.

Though Mr Erdogan remains firmly in control of the central government and doesn’t face re-election until 2023, losing Turkey’s commercial and cultural centre would dim the president’s aura of invincibility.

But observers said that blocking Mr Imamoglu, should he now win by a wide margin, would undermine the AKP’s own electoral mandate.

“The AK Party’s legitimacy derives from the ballot box, [making it difficult] to simply argue that Imamoglu can’t have the post,” said Emre Erdogan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bilgi University. “Denying him the office if he is the clear winner would mean the AKP has crossed a line.”

And it may not crush the challenge that Mr Imamoglu has come to represent, his supporters said.

“If they cancel this election, Imamoglu will only come back stronger,” said Mehmetcan Cicek, a 21-year-old street vendor. “The spark has been lit, and even Erdogan can’t extinguish it.”