Istanbul Notebook

‘It’s official. Turkey is a banana republic!’ My friend Mustapha, a serial entrepreneur, sends me a flurry of doom-laden WhatsApp messages on hearing the news that Istanbul’s mayoral election is being re-run. One of them is a cartoon of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan standing in front of the national flag, crescent turned into a banana. In March, his ruling AKP lost Istanbul, the engine of what remains of the Turkish economy, together with Izmir and Ankara. It was a historic breakthrough for the opposition CHP and its victorious mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu. But it was also a massive threat to Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, who hasn’t lost an election since 1994. He alleged dirty tricks and leant on the election authority to order a re-run. Will the rest be history? Bulent Gultekin, a former Central Bank governor, tweets of a ‘coup’ against the will of the people: ‘The AKP has brought my fine country to the brink of political and economic collapse.’