ISTANBUL (AP) — The Latest on Turkey’s municipal elections (all times local):
11 p.m.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says his ruling party has emerged the winner of Turkey’s mayoral elections “by a wide margin” and has dealt a blow to those who tried to bring Turkey to its knees.
Erdogan spoke after preliminary results relayed by state media showed that his party had gained some 45 percent of the votes, but lost the mayoral seat of Ankara to the main opposition after 25 years. The president had cast the elections as a matter of “national survival.”
Erdogan said: “we accept that we have gained the hearts of the people in the places where we won, but were not successful enough in this regard in the places that we lost.”
The Turkish leader noted that a pro-Kurdish party, which he branded as terrorists for their alleged links to outlawed Kurdish rebels, had suffered losses in the country’s mostly-Kurdish populated regions.
He said that “our Kurdish brothers have shown that they will not yield to a terrorist group or to those who have come out of the woodwork with the backing of the terrorist group.”
