Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose to make Sunday’s municipal elections a vote of confidence in his 16 years of rule. In the view of some commentators, he has suffered an humiliating defeat, losing control of the capital Ankara and apparently also of Istanbul, the country’s commercial and cultural hub.

The result in Istanbul is being disputed by his Justice and Development Party (AKP) which has referred the count to the Supreme Election Board. According to the official figures, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu scraped a win by 25,000 votes. However, AKP organizers protest there were over 300,000 spoilt ballot papers and are, therefore, demanding a recount.

Two factors stand out in this vote. With his nationalist ally the MHP, Erdogan’s candidates attracted some 51 percent of the vote against the almost 42 percent of the three main opposition parties, including the Kurdish HDP. If this vote was indeed free and fair, then the president’s popularity is still reasonably strong, despite declining economic conditions, with strong inflation and steeply rising prices.

It is possible to believe that Erdogan did not desire any vote tampering, though local officials, eager to please, may have acted on their own initiative. It seems far more likely the president did not, for one moment, doubt his own popularity despite his administration’s recent setbacks. Therefore, on Monday night, when the results came in, while he was a little reserved addressing supporters, he was far from accepting that the vote was a rejection of his policies or that they were in any way wrong. “If” he said, “we have deficiencies, it is our duty to fix them”.

Should the AKP Istanbul mayoral candidate Binali Yildirim appeal successfully over the count, it will not be surprising. Erdogan has created a powerful executive presidency with firm control of the judiciary and legislature. The Supreme Election Board may feel considerable pressure to rule in Yildirim’s favor because Istanbul matters so much to the president. Erdogan cut his political teeth in the city where he was generally regarded as a successful mayor, running a city hall markedly freer of the corruption that had disfigured previous administrations.

Whenever he can, Erdogan abandons the thousand-room presidential palace he built for himself in Ankara and returns to his home in the city. Indeed, one of the compelling reasons that AKP lost control of the capital was a general feeling among citizens that their city was missing out in major investments and status to Istanbul. Besides being an Istanbullu born in the Kasimpasa district, Erdogan’s view of Ankara is probably influenced by the fact that it was chosen by the Republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as the capital of his new secular state, precisely because it was far away from the politicking and conspiracies that characterized Istanbul as the former Ottoman capital.

Commentators may be describing Sunday’s vote as humbling, but the autocratic Erdogan does not really do “humble”. He knows that he will not have to face the electorate for another four years. If the Istanbul result is overturned, he can live with the loss of Ankara and having Izmir, the country’s third city, remain in CHP hands. He is likely to press on with his close friendship with Russia’s Putin and the ayatollahs in Iran while remaining a key sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the political voice of international terror.