Turkish voters in Istanbul who chose an opposition mayor instead of the government nominee now have a second chance to get it right. Whether they are grateful for the opportunity remains to be seen.

At the end of March they rejected Binali Yildirim the candidate from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and chose instead Ekrem Imamoglu from the main opposition, the CHP. However, his victory was narrow, a mere 13,000 votes. AK party chiefs demanded recounts. But when these failed to reverse the result, they appealed to the country’s Supreme Electoral Council. This week that body, which is dominated by members of the governing party, ordered by seven votes to four that the election should be re-run.

AK officials had originally challenged the outcome alleging fraud. However, if the recounts revealed anything, it was that government supporters had endeavored to fix the vote in Yildirim’s favor. In the end, the electoral authorities chose to nullify the vote on two technicalities. The first was that not all the officials at polling stations had been properly appointed; the second that not all of the result papers had been properly signed. This may seem like legal nitpicking, but as one of Erdogan’s aides pointed out, the law is the law and must be obeyed.

Except that in fact it is not. Those very same irregularities were involved in the election of district mayors and city councilors. But those elections, which saw widespread success for AK candidates, are not due to be re-run. This is a clear demonstration that Erdogan is less interested in legal niceties and more concerned about exploiting legal loopholes to fix the system for the benefit of his AK party. It is also remarkable that in the capital Ankara, where a CHP candidate won the mayoralty by a margin of almost four percent, AK is still seeking to challenge the result.

Many voters in Ankara, the country’s administrative center and Istanbul, its commercial and business hub, are understandably furious. Even a distinguished academic and long-time supporter of Erdogan has expressed his concern at this interference in the democratic process. Foreign investors are even less impressed. The Turkish economy is already in serious trouble. The corporate sector is struggling to repay high levels of foreign currency debt because of the more than 30 percent collapse in the value of the lira. Meanwhile the government has spent billions on grandiose infrastructure schemes and run up huge levels of state debt. It is almost certainly collapsing living standards rather than a pushback by the liberal establishment that has robbed the AK party of votes. Erdogan has been one of the country’s most popular politicians but his support has declined as a result of his economic failures. There are no signs that Turkey’s financial woes are going away any time soon.

Basically the problem for Erdogan and his people is that they believe that voters are not entitled to choose anyone but them. And Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, whose tenure was unusually successful, regards his home city as the jewel in his political crown. He has frequently said: “Whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey”. But now he cannot face the unfortunate reality that whoever loses Istanbul loses Turkey and is busy distorting the democratic process to try and make it go away.