Erdogan's AK Party 'loses' major Turkey cities in local elections - Aljazeera.com

Istanbul, Turkey - Turkey's ruling party has lost mayoral elections in the country's largest three cities - Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir - in a stunning election setback for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to unofficial results published by state-run Anadolu Agency on Monday.

The official results will be released after the country's election board looks into objections filed by political parties, who have three days to file complaints.

Anadolu's unofficial data shows Republican People's Party's (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu won the heated mayoral race in Istanbul, the country's largest city and economic centre, with 48.8 percent of the vote, while the ruling Justice and Development (AK Party) candidate Binali Yildirim got 48.5 percent.

In the capital, Ankara, unofficial results showed that CHP candidate Mansur Yavas had garnered 50.9 percent, with the AK Party nominee Mehmet Ozhaseki trailing on 47.2 percent.

In the third-largest city, Izmir, the CHP candidate, Mustafa Tunc Soyer, was leading with 58 percent votes while AK Party's Nihat Zeybekci stood at 38.5 percent.

All of the votes have been counted in the three largest cities.

The ruling AK Party, which ran as part of the People's Alliance, lost both Ankara and Istanbul in Sunday's local elections, which were held against the backdrop of Turkey's first recession in a decade while its lira currency lost as much as 40 percent of its value against the US dollar last year.

The race in Istanbul was particularly tight, with both AK Party and the CHP claiming victory in Istanbul's mayoral election.

Yildirim claimed early on Monday that he had won the race by around 4,000 votes, but later admitted he was 25,000 votes behind Imamoglu from CHP, which is part of the Nation Alliance.

Yildirim's statement

Yildirim, however, said that his party had objections to the results over invalid votes.

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"There are 31,136 ballot boxes [in Istanbul]. If there is one invalid vote in each ballot box, it makes 31,136 votes in total, which is more than the difference [between the two sides]," he said, adding that there are some 315,500 invalid votes in the polls.

Sezgin Tanrikulu, a CHP MP from Istanbul, said that although Imamoglu won the race in Istanbul, the election board was waiting for the objection period to end for legal reasons to declare the official winner.

"There have been complaints about certain ballot boxes. Legally, the party objecting should show a valid reason in doing so over each particular ballot box. Therefore, the number of boxes votes will be recounted in is limited," he told Al Jazeera.

"The government should respect the results."

According to Galip Dalay, a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, the results are not a mathematical loss for the AK Party, but they still would not be taken lightly by Erdogan's bloc.

"However, it is a psychological loss as it lost several major cities including the biggest three," Dalay, who is also a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution in Doha, told Al Jazeera.

"Early elections are out of the picture due to the fact that it did not suffer major losses in terms of vote numbers, but the result might set a context for wider discussions within the party and the conservative camp in Turkey about policy choices."

Speaking at a news conference in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan acknowledged that his party had lost control in a number of cities and pledged that he would focus on carrying out economic reforms.

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Erdogan, who was elected last year as the country's first executive president, said the next polls would be held in June 2023, adding that Turkey would carefully implement a "strong economic programme" without compromising on free-market rules.

Ozgur Dilber, a CHP volunteer, said the results showed that the AK Party's popularity was waning.

"To me, the results are proof that the number of voters who want change is increasing," he told Al Jazeera speaking on the election results on Sunday.

Focus on economy, security

The polls posed a major challenge for Erdogan, given a backdrop of high inflation and rising unemployment sparked by a major currency crisis last year.

Earlier this month, official statistics showed that in the last two quarters of 2018, the Turkish economy slipped into its first recession in a decade, as inflation and interest rates soared due to the currency meltdown.

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In February, inflation stood at just under 20 percent, while the Central Bank's main interest rate is currently 24 percent.

In the lead-up to Sunday's vote, the People's Alliance sought to link the local polls to internal and external risks threatening the country's security.

Erdogan has often blamed foreign powers and "speculators" for the currency fluctuations and other economic woes faced by Turkey - a message he repeated this week.

For its part, the main opposition alliance has focused its campaign on the economic situation and its effect on citizens.

It also used Turkish flags in their campaigns, rather than party banners, in an apparent bid to attract voters from different backgrounds.

Follow Umut Uras on Twitter @Um_Uras

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/erdogan-ak-party-loses-major-turkey-cities-local-elections-190401172133394.html

2019-04-01 19:29:00Z
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UK lawmakers discuss halting Brexit after petition hits 6 million - Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers debated halting Brexit on Monday after a record six million people signed a petition to revoke the process that set Britain on course to leave the European Union.

Anti-Brexit supporters protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

Britons voted to leave the European Union by 52 percent to 48 percent in 2016, and the following year British Prime Minister Theresa May gave notice of the intent to leave the bloc on March 29, 2019 under Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.

But May has failed on three occasions to pass her EU Withdrawal Agreement, forcing a delay to Brexit until at least April 12 and leading to some for call for the whole divorce to be cancelled altogether.

The online petition to revoke Article 50 took off after a speech when May said that she was on the side of the British public over Brexit. Its website repeatedly failed as it garnered as many as 2,000 signatures a minute.

“This petition has been supported by an unprecedented number of people, although it’s not surprising because we live in unprecedented times,” Catherine McKinnell, an opposition Labour lawmaker, said as she introduced the debate.

The debate is largely symbolic and did not take place in the main chamber of the House of Commons, where discussions on alternatives to May’s Brexit plan were taking place.

Petitions on the government’s website are debated after they reach 100,000 signatures and the government must respond to all petitions with more than 10,000 names.

“This government will not revoke Article 50. We will honour the result of the 2016 referendum and work with parliament to deliver a deal that ensures we leave the European Union,” the government said in response to the petition.

The revoke petition is the largest parliamentary one ever, beating the 4.15 million signatures for a 2016 petition which called for another EU referendum in the event that neither the remain or leave camps achieved 60 percent of the vote.

More than 1.8 million people signed a petition calling for U.S. President Donald Trump to be prevented from making a state visit to Britain, leading to a debate in parliament in 2017

Reporting by Alistair Smout; editing by Michael Holden

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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2019-04-01 17:30:00Z
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Brexit: In another round of ‘indicative votes,’ Parliament hopes to break the political stalemate - The Washington Post

LONDON —  After voting “no” so many times, the British Parliament may be ready to vote “aye” on something.

On Monday, Parliament will again try to seize the steering wheel from Prime Minister Theresa May, as the House of Commons stages votes on four proposals on how to exit the European Union.

Among the top options are two that would call for much softer Brexit than May has envisioned.

The two proposals would see Britain remain in closely tied to European trade rules and tariff regimes. One option would essentially mean that Britain would surrender its ability to control European immigration. The other would likely keep Britain from setting off to strike its own independent trade deals.

Trade experts, describing the two options, say they could deliver a kind of “ultra-soft” Brexit, that sees Britain “take back a bit of control.” 

Another popular option may push the government to stage a second referendum to take the questions of how or whether to leave back to the people.

And the fourth essentially seeks to cancel Brexit.

These will be non-binding “indicative votes,” expressing the will of Parliament. An earlier round of votes failed to produce a majority for any of eight proposals last week. But a big shift by the Labour Party and other political maneuvering may change the math on Monday evening.

All this comes amid growing signs that the British prime minister has lost control of Brexit, her party and her cabinet.

The Conservative Party is open revolt. Over the weekend, a bloc of 170 Conservative members, including 10 cabinet ministers, wrote to May demanding that Britain leave the E.U. “with or without a deal,” according to the Sunday Times of London.

Her cabinet, meanwhile, is now staffed by coup plotters and direct competitors. Hardline Brexiteers and those ministers pushing for a softer Brexter are both threatening to resign if they don’t get their way.

The government secretaries have become so unruly that May’s own chief whip, Julian Smith, in a rare on-the-record interview with the BBC, described them as the “worst example of ill-discipline in cabinet in British political history.”

Smith’s bold statement of unprecedented bad behavior was remarkable not only for what he said — but who said it. 

Chief whips are supposed to be like Victorian children in the extreme, never seen nor heard. They are virtually invisible to the world outside the Palace of Westminster, and their one and only job is to enforce party discipline; in other words, to “whip” their members — via text and WhatsApp group — to vote one way or another.

In his remarks, Smith also said that after the results of the 2017 general election, when the Conservative Party dramatically lost its parliamentary majority, May should have been clear that the result would spell a softer kind of Brexit.

Instead, May made bold speeches and erected red lines.

And yet, May still could get her deal passed. Her supporters say it is likely that the prime minister will try a fourth time to get it through the House of Commons.

Why would lawmakers approve on a fourth vote that which they have rejected three times before? May’s latest threat: If her Conservative members don’t rally round her deal, she will call for a general election.

This appears an empty threat by a weakened party leader. In part because the latest opinion surveys show the opposition Labour Party are polling ahead of the Tories — despite Labour being equally divided between “leavers” and “remainers.” In that environment, it’s hard to see Conservatives helping to provide the two-thirds majority required for a general election.

Last week, May said she would step down if her deal finally, somehow, gets over the finish line, thus allowing someone else to take the reins in the second phase of Brexit negotiations. May could by replaced as leader of the government by her own party without the need for a general election. 

In no time at all, Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and a favorite to replace May as Conservative leader, dropped his opposition and backed May’s deal.

“We need to get Brexit done, because we have so much more to do, and so much more that unites the Conservative party than divides us,” Johnson wrote in Monday’s Daily Telegraph, which sounded to some like a leadership bid. 

“We have so many achievements to be proud of – and yet every single one is being drowned out in the Brexit cacophony,” Johnson said.

On Monday, Parliament was scheduled to first discuss the more than 6 million citizens who signed an online petition to cancel Brexit, making it the most popular petition ever hosted on Parliament’s website.

On Monday evening, Parliament will renew its attempt to find an alternative to May’s deal.

One soft Brexit option could include a commitment to remain in a “permanent customs union” with the E.U. — such an arrangement allows those within the union to trade freely without tariffs, but sets an external tariff on all goods coming into the bloc. Such a deal would make it hard for Britain to go global and cut its own trade deals abroad, as it would be locked into E.U. tariff regimes. But it could control European immigration. 

Another soft Brexit option is a Norway-style relationship that would involve staying in the E.U. single, or common, market. This path may allow Britain to seek trade deals outside the E.U., but would likely mean that Britain would have to allow for free movement of E.U. citizens into Britain.

When Parliament held similar series of “indicative votes” last week, the closest over the customs union, which only lost by six votes.

Some Conservatives remain deeply opposed to these options, in part because they see it as “Brexit in name only,” crossing all their red lines — preventing Britain from striking new trade deals with countries like the United States and China while keeping the borders wide-open to European migrants.

Steve Baker, a Conservative lawmaker and arch Brexiteer, is one of those adamantly opposed. He told the BBC that joining opposition parties and supporting a vote of no-confidence in the May government was “on the table” if the government were to adopt this option.

Ken Clarke, a veteran Conservative lawmaker who proposed the customs union motion, told the BBC that the option would indeed limit Britain in its ability to agree tariff concessions to non-member E.U. countries. But he pointed out that Britain could strike trade deals on services, which make up about 80 percent of the British economy. He added some Brexiteers espousing the benefits of Global Britain striking new trade deals with countries like America are “getting carried away.” 

The idea that “Donald Trump is going to suddenly open up his market to us with joy because he’s so pleased we’ve damaged the European Union. That is total nonsense,” Clarke said.

Read more

Frexit? Italeave? After watching Brexit, other European countries say: No, thanks.

What is Brexit? Britain’s political drama, explained.

Brits pretend they’re sick of Brexit. But truth is they’re obsessed.

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/brexit-latest-news/2019/04/01/a609fccc-5258-11e9-bdb7-44f948cc0605_story.html

2019-04-01 17:03:45Z
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Indicative Votes: round 2 | Brexit LIVE - The Sun

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2019-04-01 14:27:42Z
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Turkey local elections: Setback for Erdogan in big cities - BBC News - Cengiz Adabag News

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2019-04-01 13:43:08Z
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Turkey's lira gyrates as President Erdogan's party suffers pivotal losses - CNBC

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has lost the capital Ankara and looks set to lose the commercial hub of Istanbul after 25 years in power in both cities, as Sunday's municipal election results — largely seen as a referendum on the president himself — roll in.

The Turkish lira fell sharply at the opening of London trade on Monday, the latest rout after a turbulent week that saw Turkey's overnight swap rate shoot up as high as 1,200 percent as the central bank tried to shore up the currency.

The lira sunk at roughly 8:30 a.m London time Monday after the country's election board said the opposition party was ahead in Istanbul's mayoral election, briefly trading at $5.6913. But by 1:00 p.m. the currency had regained those losses and was trading at $5.5212.

The currency had traded at 5.61 to the dollar after the initial results came in on Sunday evening, compared with 5.55 at Friday's close. The country's BIST 100 stock index was down 1.65 percent in the morning session, after falling more than 7 percent last week.

Markets now fear that the electoral losses will push Erdogan to double down on populist policies that helped send the currency tanking last year, when his interference in central bank independence held interest rates down despite soaring inflation and sent investors running for the hills. Last year saw the lira lose as much as 40 percent of its value against the dollar, although it had trimmed some of those losses by year end.

The victories claimed by the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) are a formidable blow to the ruling right-wing AK Party — particularly the expected loss of Istanbul, where Erdogan first made his political debut as city mayor in the 1990s. Still, the AK Party and its far-right coalition partner the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) secured more than 50 percent of the national vote and won a majority of Istanbul's districts.

"It appears that the worsening economic condition of the household had a say on the results," Can Selçuki, general manager of Istanbul Economics Research, told CNBC on Monday morning.

"A combination of economic conditions and candidates that has appeal to both sides of the aisle has helped the opposition to win a number of large cities including Ankara, Adana, Mersin, Antalya and very likely Istanbul."

Voters went to the polls with a major concern at the top of their list: the economy. Given this, the results shouldn't take anyone by surprise, said Sanjay Uppal, CEO of StraitsBridge Advisors.

"The events of the last 12 to 18 months have caused a lot of grief to the business community, the financial services, and also the investors and their confidence," Uppal told CNBC's "Capital Connection" on Monday.

"On the back of this, the current reforms so far haven't delivered a message that would bring that confidence back ... So the populace has voted for an alternative to balance out the national government."

Turkey's economy fell into a recession last year, and unemployment is now around 13 percent, nearly a decade high. Inflation sat at 19.7 in February — though that's the first time it's dropped below 20 percent since August.

"The market will now want to see what reforms the AKP is going to roll out, after the new promises made by Erdogan," Timothy Ash, senior emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, commented in an email note Monday, noting that the president will remain powerful and well-supported among his more religious and rural base.

"The actual election results don't change that much, Turkey still faces huge economic challenges based around a loss of confidence in policy making," he said.

"First and foremost confidence in economic policy making has to be rebuilt to stop the trend of rising dollarization ... AKP government (is) over 50 percent nationally, promising reform, and they now have to deliver otherwise markets will punish Turkey brutally. That is the lesson from recent months."

The drop in the lira has led to the weakening of consumer purchasing power and caused acute pain for Turkish banks and businesses with high dollar-denominated debt — reports have put the volume of Turkey's foreign-currency denominated corporate debt at 50 percent of the country's GDP (gross domestic product).

Erdogan is credited with transforming Turkey's economy into a powerhouse in the early 2000s, drawing unprecedented foreign investment and creating more than 1 million jobs. But recent years have seen the leader adopt a more populist and nationalist bent, featuring various diplomatic spats with Western allies, while consolidating executive power through constitutional changes and a heavy crackdown on dissent.

Turkey's large current account deficit, its shrinking foreign exchange reserves, and relations with key Western allies remain top challenges for the country — the lira is set to remain "on the front line over the next few weeks" until the government resolves those issues, Ash said.

And the central bank's efforts to prop up the currency will run out of steam as it's already burned through one-third of its foreign reserves in the first three weeks of March alone.

"(Turkish Finance Minister) Albayrak has to come up with a program to convince markets and importantly locals that the current management team know what they are doing, rebuilding credibility in the process," Ash said. "If they are not able to do this under their own steam, then it is hard to imagine a scenario where they can avoid going to the IMF."

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/turkey-lira-slides-as-erdogans-party-suffers-pivotal-losses.html

2019-04-01 12:06:35Z
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Reiwa: Naming a new era in Japan - BBC News - Cengiz Adabag News

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2019-04-01 11:35:23Z
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