Erdogan Promises to Transfer Power Peacefully If He Loses Ballot

He said "we will accept defeat as we did in the Istanbul elections" but in those elections he managed to cancel the election by claiming that the ballot for the mayor was stolen when the ballot for the council was not. How convenient, since his party won the council.

Both of the ballots are voted together and put in the same envelope but somehow only one of the votes was stolen.

Anyway, before the election re-run they paid out the outstanding sums to the contractors close to them, they hired large number of supporters and did other arrangements.

The elected mayor tried to backup the IT systems before being removed and was accused with espionage.

The interior ministry recently said that the mayors in the Kurdish regions were swiftly removed upon Erdogan's request. Officially, they are removed due to terror allegations. The same guy was trying to have police force present at the election locations and doing parallel counting but thankfully the elections committee denied his request(legally, the police are not allowed more than 100 meters to the ballots unless their help is requested).

Anyway, if the results are close I wouldn't trust Erdogan to step down easily. His whole election campaign revolves around the premise that the opposition are bunch of traitors and terrorist(in literal sense. In his rallies he plays clips of the opposition with literal terrorist edited in), I don't know how he will explain to his base leaving the power to "traitors" and "terrorists".

We even had video records and phone records collected by the police but he got away because those who collected these records were connected to a religious cult which is very unpopular among the population and suspected of covert political actions since decades. That said, some evidence is too hard to ignore. For example, there's the case of a bank CEO who was caught with millions of dollars in shoeboxes at his home, in connection with the Erdogan alegations. He was handed back the money and left alone on camera.

There are huge number of people with grievances towards Erdogan, the population wouldn't be satisfied if Erdogan doesn't face some justice. He accumulated so much hate during his tenure and he and his family become incredibly rich when huge number of people suffered. It's not going to be a finished business without getting tried on these things.

That said: I'm not sure there's much point in debating what Erdogan might do if he loses.

* If you don't know about Erdogan, theres too much for a HN thread.

* The 1936 Montreux Convention allows Turkey to deny any country at war (not with Turkey) to deny warship passage, except to return home.

* Turkey is an incredibly important part of NATO because of their ability to choke Black Sea access.

* This has kept Russia's warm warm navy in check, particularly for the Ukraine conflict

* NATO requires Democracy and "Rule of Law" for member nations

* NATO has never had to remove a member state, and honestly nobody is sure how that'd happen

* The US leases airbases in Turkey, with nuclear penetration bombers and nuclear warheads stored on site.

* Russia has always seen this as a double standard when the US complains about Russia putting nukes in places like Belarus.

* Trump denied Turkey access to the F-35 program because they chose to install S400 systems from Russia.

* Credit due were credit due, military analysts generally agree this was a good decision, and it was at the request of bi-partisan lawmakers.

* The thought was Russia could profile F-35 fighter's radar returns somehow with S400 systems

* This is _in spite_ of Turkey committing funds to the F-35 program, which to this date, said funds have not been returned to Turkey.