Istanbul's vexed elections
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Turkish commercial capital must vote again for a new mayor after March's election result was overturned by the government.
Ed Butler visits the city and meets Ekrem Imamoglu, who narrowly won in March but spent just 17 days in office before the decision was made to re-run the election. Mr Imamoglu says he saw overspending and waste, and that around 10% of the city's budget could be saved.
The country is also experiencing an economic slowdown, and Ed speaks to Deniz Gider of the Turkish construction workers' union, about how it's affecting his members. Plus economist and political scientist Atilla Yesilada explains how Turkey finds itself in this current economic crisis.
(Picture: Supporters of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu protest against the re-run of the mayoral election in Istanbul; Credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.1 | I'm Ed Butler. Today I'm in Istanbul, just a few days ahead of city elections here |
| 0:11.4 | that some say are crucial in the country's economic and political development. |
| 0:16.8 | First of all, this will be an election for Istanbul, |
| 0:21.0 | but the 23rd of June election has also become a struggle for democracy in all of Turkey. |
| 0:29.5 | We are struggling. Everything is more expensive now. Everything, the prices are increasing, |
| 0:35.2 | but our wages are not increasing. |
| 0:38.8 | And I think that the government did this for just taking votes, more wars. |
| 0:45.2 | Certainly, we don't have debt. |
| 0:47.3 | There's a conspiracy about Turkish economics globally, |
| 0:50.5 | because the economic performance of Turkey was and is so successful during the last 20 years. |
| 0:56.3 | Turkey, crisis? No crisis. That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:05.4 | A brass band with a crowd holding up pictures of Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kamal, heads down the street in front of me all the way to the waterfront. |
| 1:16.6 | Flags and banners are waving. |
| 1:18.6 | The demonstration is marking 100 years since the founding of the Turkish state. |
| 1:23.4 | But like so many things in this country, a patriotic memorial can rapidly turn into a comment on present politics. |
| 1:31.1 | A cancelled election of the city's mayor, Ekrem Imam Molo. |
| 1:39.2 | What's just going on now is a bunch of scuba divers have just leapt into the bosphorus here right in front of us. |
| 1:46.1 | They're swimming around. There are these orange flares firing out orange smoke everywhere, |
| 1:52.3 | and they're waving flags, and they've just chanted something. I'm here with Gulsar Karadak, |
| 1:58.7 | who's a local journalist and producer. What is going on here, Gulsar Karadak, who's a local journalist and producer. |
| 2:02.3 | What is going on here, Gorsha? |
... |
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