Opposition candidate in Istanbul growing more popular – Google

Doaa Emam

The search engine, Google, has documented an increase in the popularity of opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul’s mayoral elections.

Imamoglu’s popularity has even outpaced this of his rival Binali Yildirim, the government-backed candidate and former prime minister of Turkey, Google said.

Imamoglu’s popularity has risen over this of his rival by 3.6% since the election commission cancelled out the results of the previous mayoral elections and decided to hold an election re-run, it added.

The global search engine revealed that statistic based on the most frequent searches, as well as the most frequently used keywords.

Despite the indications that the opposition candidate is becoming increasingly popular, observers see that using one candidate’s name more than the other is not as likely to be lucky.

Google pointed out that the candidate of the Republican People’s Party Muharram Engha was lucky on the internet last year, even as the AKP candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the presidential vote by 52%. This encouraged the opposition to refer to election fraud.

Yildirim’s popularity declining

The results of the study conducted by Hilmi Dashmir, president of Optimar for research and opinion polls, on the mayoral elections in Istanbul revealed the superiority of Imamoglu by 52% and 48% of the votes going to Yildirim.

The two candidates are expected to hold a television debate on Sunday (June 16th). The debate was described by the Turkish president as a breakpoint in the elections, and it will be a real signal to the orientation of citizens.

As for Yildirim’s popularity, Turkish newspapers reported that exposing corruption and graft cases against the leaders of the AKP Party, the enemies of the Kurds and the use of the scarecrow of terrorism were all factors that led to the weighting of Imamoglu at the expense of the ruling party’s candidate.