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Erdogan Promises to Transfer Power Peacefully If He Loses Ballot

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Re: Erdogan Promises to Transfer Power Peacefully If He Loses Ballot

#3
this is good to hear, but a little bit hard to believe. back in 2019, local elections in Istanbul was annulled by the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) without any real basis [1]. thankfully voters showed up in larger numbers and the opposition won with a greater margin.

opinion polls show razor thin margins right now and if the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu wins it will unlikely be by a landslide. like everyone, I would love to see a peaceful transfer of power, but a lot is at stake for Erdogan and his government. I am sure he will not be conceding immediately and he has a lot of influence over any judicial institution in the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2019_Istanbul_mayoral_el...

Re: Erdogan Promises to Transfer Power Peacefully If He Loses Ballot

#4
post #3

this is good to hear, but a little bit hard to believe. back in 2019, local elections in Istanbul was annulled by the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) without any real basis [1]. thankfully voters showed up in larger numbers and the opposition won with a greater margin. opinion polls show razor thin margins right now and if the opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu wins it will unlikely be by a landslide. like everyone…

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Re: Erdogan Promises to Transfer Power Peacefully If He Loses Ballot

#10
post #2

Transfer of power only matters in a free and fair election

On the contrary, these things are on a spectrum. In many places elections are not fair, but they are also not completely controlled either -- e.g. someone can bias the election results in their favor by 10 percentage points but still lose if something happened recently that caused their support to drop by 30 percentage points. That is the reality in many places (and that type of unfair biasing happens in bastions of democracy in the West too, e.g. gerrymandering). The peaceful transfer of power is much more crucial than the election being *perfectly* fair (because we hardly have perfectly fair elections -- "mostly" fair and "well representative" is what we can hope for most of the time).
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